Brand SA admits the errors in its own annual report as MPs demand a five-year BEE plan
The Portfolio Committee on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation put 29 discrepancies to the entity, and its leadership conceded most of them were real.
Brand SA’s leadership conceded to a parliamentary committee that its annual report carried real errors, not merely rounding, after MPs spent an evening going through a list of discrepancies line by line.
The Portfolio Committee on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation met on Monday 19 October 2026 to take the entity through roughly 29 areas of concern the committee had identified in its annual report the previous week. Deputy Minister in the Presidency Kenny Morolong, who had been booked off sick for the earlier meeting, told the committee the ministry had directed that the chief executive answer the schedule of responses rather than give a broad presentation.
The chief executive and chief financial officer then walked the committee through the corrections. Among them, a figure on slide 40 populated as currency was in fact a measure of global reach. A slide on elevated global positioning was redone because some indices had fallen while others rose. Percentage figures were updated from 87% to 84.3%. Staffing percentages were recomputed. The five-year expenditure slide included a financial year that fell outside the period and should have been excluded.
On the black economic empowerment scorecard, the entity reported non-compliance for the 2023/24 financial year, then a compliant status at level 8 for 2024/25, with the 2025/26 review still under way. The chief executive attributed the earlier failure to the absence of a board, management in acting positions and weak skills and enterprise development scores. A committee member rejected the framing, telling the meeting that level 8 is the bottom of the scale for a state entity and asking how it inspires the private sector.
The committee also pressed the entity on the gap between the Auditor-General’s figure of about R4 million in possible fruitless and wasteful expenditure on a former chief financial officer’s settlement and the roughly R2.08 million the entity’s own investigation arrived at. Brand SA said the Auditor-General had been kept informed throughout and was part of the process. The chairperson of the audit and risk committee explained that the board had approved an increase in the former CFO’s salary from the 25th to the 50th percentile, which raised what she was entitled to and lowered the liability from R4 million to R2 million. The total fruitless and wasteful expenditure recognised for 2025/26 was R5.35 million, including about R3 million on a separate Vodacom matter.
On the long-running question of whether Brand SA is to be merged with another entity, Morolong said he had no knowledge of any such decision and that the position had been put to the committee before, in December 2024. A member said he would submit correspondence on the matter to the committee secretary that night.
The committee did not adopt the Brand SA report. The chairperson said the documents circulated were drafts, that the team would consolidate the day’s corrections, and that the committee could convene again, even for 30 minutes, to consider and adopt it before the afternoon deadline set by the House Chair for submission of committee reports. He also told members that the draft Brand SA report had been compiled from the earlier information and would now be updated.
Brand SA committed to presenting a five-year transformation plan and a plan for the coming financial year covering all elements of the BEE scorecard. Morolong apologised for what he called any impression of a relaxed approach to reporting.
The committee then moved to the annual reports of the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation and the State Security Agency. On DPME, the draft observations recorded that the department received an unqualified audit opinion with findings rather than a clean audit, that it spent R482.7 million of its R514.1 million allocation, and that the shift from a proposed holding company to a state asset management agency did not meet its original target. The committee also noted that the department acknowledged the absence of an explicit statute limits its ability to enforce planning coherence, and that a white paper on planning, monitoring and evaluation is therefore an important reform.
The meeting was broadcast by Parliament of South Africa on its YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J3BQj0skfs
