The Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) is clear: state-owned entities must handle public money with transparency, fairness, and cost-effectiveness. Procurement systems must be competitive. Leadership must prevent irregular, fruitless, and wasteful expenditure.
At Airports Company of South Africa (Acsa) , multiple safeguards appear to have failed.
What Went Wrong
According to Acsa’s own account of events, the procurement breakdown unfolded in stages:
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An emergency was declared while there was still time for a normal, competitive process.
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A request for quote (RFQ) was issued without an RFQ number.
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A supplier was invoiced before a contract or purchase order existed.
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A 50% deposit was paid on that basis.
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Goods were delivered well after the time they were needed.
The full amount was later classified as irregular expenditure, a finding confirmed by Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke.
Who Is Accountable?
Under the PFMA, the accounting authority of a state-owned company is its board. The board carries fiduciary responsibility for financial management, internal controls, and procurement systems. Delegations of authority do not remove that accountability.
The CEO, as executive head and board member, is part of that leadership structure. While not automatically liable for every procurement decision, the CEO is responsible for ensuring that proper systems, oversight, and consequence management exist.
If those systems fail, the PFMA expects both executive leadership and the board to be answerable.
The Questions That Follow
At this juncture, further accountability must be pursued:
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To the Minister of Transport: As the executive authority overseeing Acsa, the minister must be satisfied that proper oversight is exercised and that corrective action is taken.
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To National Treasury: As the custodian of the PFMA, Treasury must ensure that irregular expenditure is investigated and that consequence management is applied.
Why It Matters
Irregular expenditure is not a technicality. It is public money spent outside the rules designed to protect it. When procurement systems are bypassedwhen RFQs lack numbers, invoices precede contracts, and deposits are paid without proper authorisationthe risk of waste, inefficiency, and corruption rises.
The Auditor-General’s classification confirms that at Acsa, that risk materialised.
The Bottom Line
The PFMA’s accountability framework is designed to ensure that when failures occur, there are consequences. The board is answerable. Executive leadership is answerable. And when the systems they are responsible for fail, they must explain whyand what they will do to ensure it never happens again.
At Acsa, the breakdown has been documented. The irregular expenditure has been confirmed. The question now is whether the accountability the PFMA demands will follow.
