Following an article published on 23 June 2021, Step Up SA News received a letter from Free State Provincial Treasury (FSPT) Acting Head of Department (HoD), Ms. Sesing, in what we view as a fishing exercise aimed at distracting us from exposing the personal protective equipment (PPE) corruption that has caused havoc across South Africa since the eruption of the novel coronavirus.
Our attempt to solicit answers from Treasury was to no avail as our email was not replied to let alone acknowledged.
As a matter of principle, on 13 June 2021, we consequently sent a follow-up email to the MEC’s Spokesperson, Mr. Visagie, who asked for the contact details of our journalist to schedule an interview. Needleless to say this interview never materialized.
Below are issues we hoped the HoD and MEC will answer:
- Mangaung Taxi Rank
- Maluti a Phofung (MAP) water and electricity crisis
- Budget allocation and misuse of public funds
- PPE scandals update
On the 18th of June 2021, we texted Mr Visagie PPE-related questions with specific focus to Special Investigative Unit’s (SIU) damning report in which a senior manager in the Treasury is implicated and to which Mr Visagie committed to respond. A few minutes later, the Treasury spokesperson, Mr Tshidiso Mokokoane, texted us committing to send their response by 10h00 on Saturday (19 June 2021). That response never came.
A day later, we reached out to him again without any success.
We moved our publishing day to Wednesday to accommodate the Treasury only for them to say the matter is with the SIU. The SIU report recommended the manager in question be charged for fraud and FSPT to institute disciplinary hearing. This information is available to the public.
We then started to dig deep and discovered the name of a senior manager but, because he has not appeared in court, we kept his name from the public domain. We also discovered that he has been moved to Department of Health to a junior position a month SIU report was released and is pending finalization of the investigation which includes Hawks.
Nine days after we published the article, the Treasury HoD then sends us a letter which appears to insinuate we did not follow all the necessary steps to publish the story. In that letter, she:
- wants us to reveal our sources
- wants us to wait for the press conference
- wants to know if we verified the information
- wants us to substantiate the contents of the article when all her answers are in the SIU report. We don’t work for Treasury.
This story is of public interest and we shall follow it up whether Treasury responds or not.
We do not take censoring and silencing kindly as we have afforded them a right of reply and they chose not to exercise it.
This is spat on the statement released by President Ramaphosa on May 3, 2021
In a statement released on World Press Freedom Day, Ramaphosa noted that the media had exposed “much of what we know today about the true extent of capture of the state by self-serving, corrupt individuals and entities”.
The South African media has played a pivotal role in uncovering incidents of state capture, President Cyril Ramaphosa
Journalists must be able to report “without fear or favour”, the president has said.
We are confident that we have done everything humanely possible to afford them a right of reply and by the way right of reply is not conditional. It is not for the Treasury to dictate to us when to publish a story and why.
We are still working on this story as none of our questions have been answered including 21 companies that provided gowns which were not sterilized and Social Development procuring 20 laptops for R500 000, that’s R25 000 per laptop.
Failure to answer questions will not distract and stop us from publishing.
At Step Up SA News, we inherently believe in the Freedom of the media as is the fundamental right of the various media—including print, radio, television, and online media. The media should operate freely in society without government control, restriction or censorship.
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