Military veterans department has run 15 years without a permanent structure, says retired general
Derek Mui, who acted as director general from 2018 to 2021, tells eNCA that four senior posts stand vacant and the department's founding organisational structure was never finalised.
The Department of Military Veterans has operated for close to fifteen years without a permanent organisational structure, and four of its most senior posts stand empty, according to a retired lieutenant general who ran the department for three years.
Lieutenant General Derek Mui acted as director general of the department from 2018 to 2021. He set out the department’s position on the CheckPoint podcast, published by eNCA (YouTube) on 17 September.
Public service regulations allow an official to act in a post for six months, extendable once for a further six. Mui acted for three years. The department is now on its third year of an acting director general, he said, and the three deputy director general posts that sit below it have also been vacant for years.
“The department is so dysfunctional that it is unfixable,” Mui told the podcast, adding that he does not believe it should be disbanded. The affairs and recognition of military veterans matter to the country, he said, but the department cannot be built on its present foundation.
The structure that was never signed off
Mui’s account of how the department reached this point begins in 2011, when the organisation was set up. The structure drawn up then was a temporary arrangement, he said, and the Department of Public Service and Administration expected officials to return within six months to a year with a permanent design.
That never happened. The department’s human resources division must recommend a structure before Public Service and Administration can approve it, and Mui said that has not been done. National Treasury, he said, is reluctant to fund a department whose structure and performance do not meet expectations.
The minister has told Parliament that many officials in the department are not qualified for the roles they hold. Mui’s answer to that is blunt, and it is about the foundation rather than the people: the structure should be taken apart and rebuilt, the organisation staffed properly, and those who should not be there removed.
He also named the internal pressures that keep qualified people away. Junior officials watch what happens at the top and attach themselves to whoever appears strong. Faction lines follow pre-1994 history, whether a person was in exile, which language they speak, and whether they served in a statutory or non-statutory force. Veterans arriving from different backgrounds, he said, do not always get the same treatment.
He does not argue for a department staffed only by administrators. Officials need to understand the origins of the people they serve, he said, and veterans who qualify for a post should not be excluded because they are veterans. Once inside, they must apply the rules equally.
The oversight that did not land
The department has been investigated repeatedly. The Public Protector and the Auditor-General have made findings against it. The Special Investigating Unit and the Hawks are investigating it now. Internal reports have been commissioned before.
Mui’s reading of why none of that has changed the department is that consequence management has not followed. The question, he said, is who commissioned each investigation, whether its findings reached the director general or the minister, and what the minister then did. Neither the official level nor the ministry level has acted, in his account.
Parliament receives the department’s quarterly and annual performance reports, its expenditure figures and its targets. Mui said the portfolio committee asks questions and issues directions, but when the minister does not implement what was promised, nothing follows. The accounting officer before Parliament is the minister, and the committee is expected to hold her to that.
The presidency is not outside this chain. Military veterans marched to the presidency while Mui was acting, and a presidential task team was set up in response. He worked with the president, through the deputy president at the time, and reported on the issues raised. He asked on the podcast what has become of that task team. The president is the patron and chief of military veterans, he noted, and the line of accountability runs from the president to the minister and from the minister to the director general.
Where the tension has already turned physical
In 2018, veterans employed by the department confronted the then director general over benefits they believed the Act entitled them to and the department was not delivering. Mui said the man was manhandled, and that he resigned as a result.
Mui described veterans as disciplined soldiers, and said the engagement with them since then has held. He added that government and senior officials should not push them to the point where they act outside the law.
Asked whether the pattern he describes is confined to this department, Mui said it is probably taking place in many others.
The Department of Military Veterans was approached for comment on the vacancies and on the status of its organisational structure. Its response will be added here.
Source: eNCA (YouTube), CheckPoint Podcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1d95X-e51Y
