The president signed a proclamation authorising the SIU to investigate allegations of maladministration and improper conduct at the destination marketing agency. From Moneyweb.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has issued a proclamation authorising the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) to investigate allegations of serious maladministration and improper conduct at South African Tourism (SAT).
The probe will investigate SAT’s payment for media services that were never delivered, focusing on three specific invoices and purchase orders.
“The investigation will focus on contracts where media buying services were paid for but either not delivered or not fully executed as stipulated in the agreements,” says a statement by the SIU.
“The investigation will determine whether the media buying contracts and related payments were conducted in a manner that was not fair, competitive, transparent, equitable, or cost-effective,” it adds.
It will focus on events between 1 March 2020 and 21 November 2025, and will examine possible violations of the law and internal policies at SAT over payments for services not rendered.
This is not the first SIU investigation of SAT affairs, though this is the first ordered by the president.
Two previous investigations were self-referred by the SAT board, one of them concerning the aborted R1 billion sponsorship deal with English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur, which was intended to promote SA as a tourist destination. The deal faced massive pushback for being unbudgeted and for conflicting with the Public Finance Management Act.
The SIU investigation into the Tottenham Hotspur deal resulted in recommendations that those responsible face disciplinary action; however, most of the implicated individuals had left SAT by the time the report was released.
In August 2025, the SAT board placed CEO Nombulelo Guliwe on precautionary suspension for not following due process in suspending the company secretary and chief marketing officer.
Tourism minister Patricia de Lille dissolved the SAT board soon after this, claiming that its suspension of Guliwe was unlawful in the absence of an appropriately appointed chairperson.
The previous chair, Professor Gregory Davids, had resigned in July. The minister says she was in the process of appointing a replacement. Still, suspended board members say her delays in appointing a replacement hobbled their ability to function as a board.
To overcome this, the board appointed board member Lawson Naidoo as the board representative pending the minister’s appointment of a replacement for Davids.
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De Lille took exception to this, and the matter is now before the courts, with the former board members seeking to set aside the minister’s decision. All but three of the suspended board members brought an urgent application before the high court, but it was thrown out in October for lack of urgency.
The minister’s legal team demanded that all suspended board members be joined to the proceedings. This has now been done, though the minister has objected to their joinder.
“We did exactly what the minister asked of us, but now she objects. This is clearly nothing more than an abuse of the court process and a waste of taxpayer money,” says suspended board member Lawson Naidoo.
In response to the president’s proclamation, the Democratic Alliance spokesperson on tourism, Haseena Ismail, says the party has been calling for such an investigation for years, as SAT lurched from one crisis to the next.
“The invoices targeted by the SIU originate from exactly that time, when the now-suspended CEO Nombulelo Guliwe, was serving as SAT’s chief financial officer.
“It was during her tenure as CFO and later as CEO that SAT recorded repeated qualified audits, incurred unauthorised expenditure, and became mired in scandals that shattered industry confidence.”
It was these governance failures that prompted the private sector’s Tourism Marketing SA (Tomsa) to withhold about R500 million in collected levy funds that were normally paid over to SAT to enhance its marketing budget.
The Auditor-General SA (Agsa) flagged a R4.1 million material irregularity in the 2024/25 financial year related to upfront payments to a supplier without receiving any services in return.
Steps have been taken to recover these funds, and a forensic investigation was initiated.
The suspended board members are almost entirely new appointees, most of them with considerable private sector experience in tourism. Their decision to suspend Guliwe was part of a process of restoring accountability at a state institution that had become mired in controversy and governance lapses.
“Minister De Lille’s decision to dissolve the SAT Board, while shielding the very executive implicated in wasteful expenditure, accelerated the collapse in governance. She ignored warnings, disrupted Auditor-General processes, and refused to release key reports. All while SAT haemorrhaged public money and public trust,” says Ismail.
