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It is clear that despite Former Minster Didiza’s efforts to help Minister Steenhuisen with the understanding of the intricacies of the Department and its entities, during the handover process, this remains inadequate. – Speaker Thoko Didiza’s spokesperson, Reggie Ngcobo.

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Sizwe sama Yende

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Former Agriculture minister Thoko Didiza has rubbished incumbent John Steenhuisen’s claims of uncovering a R500 million scandal in the Onderstepoort Biological Products (OBP).

Steenhuisen had announced that he discovered that the money, which was intended to revamp the facility for producing animal vaccines, had gone missing.

The minister said that he intended reintroducing a forensic audit into the matter.

Steenhuisen said: “The Auditor-General has flagged some issues around management, value for money and record-keeping. I’ll be reviewing the Auditor-General’s report and using it as a basis to ensure that controls are put in place to address issues around fruitless and wasteful expenditure, as well as poor record-keeping. I look forward to working with the [Auditor-General’s] office. We achieved an unqualified audit this term, and we would like to improve on that.”

However, Didiza, who is now the Speaker of Parliament, said in a statement that she had written to Steenhuisen to clarify how the portfolio committee, the OBP board and executive dealt with matter during her tenure.

Didiza said that a forensic audit report was done on the utilisation of some of the funds and enabled the OBP to take some of the concerns of sub-contracting to the Special Investigating Unit.

The OBP reported in the 2022/2023 annual report that the department approved and transferred funding of R492 million for the “modernisation” of the facility.

“Construction of the GMP facility commenced in 2017. However, the GMP facility construction was delayed due to the Covid-19 lockdown period, and other challenges,” the entity reported.

Didiza said that Steenhuisen should be circumspect about matters he communicated to the media.

“It is clear that despite Former Minster Didiza’s efforts to help Minister Steenhuisen with the understanding of the intricacies of the Department and its entities, during the handover process, this remains inadequate,” said Didiza’s spokesperson, Reggie Ngcobo.

“The former minister believes that that it’s inappropriate to make definitive statements where investigations are ongoing by law enforcement agencies and creating an impression that nothing was done to address these challenges by the previous administration,” Ngcobo added.

Democratic Alliance ministers have been enthusiastically exposing everything wrong they found as they took over some departments from ANC ministers. This has however been iviewed as grandstanding because these exposés were done on social media.pos

The party has commended Steenhuisen and said that OBP should appear before the portfolio committee to account.

"The DA stands with members of the agricultural community in raising our total dissatisfaction with OBP not fulfilling its mandate, which in turn leaves our country with a huge shortage of much needed vaccines,” said the party.

"During a meeting of the Portfolio Committee on Agriculture held at the end of July, OBP portrayed a picture that everything was in order, however, on Tuesday the Auditor General (AG) addressed the Portfolio Committee on Agriculture and revealed that there was a large portion of a grant given to OBP in 2013 that was unspent and unaccounted for.”