R25 million spent on a multipurpose sports facility which is now an empty piece of land overgrown with weeds
The Emfuleni Municipality spent R25 million to build a multipurpose sports facility. However, nine years later, it is an empty, overgrown piece of land.
Construction on the multipurpose sports facility began in 2017, promising the community a state-of-the-art centre.
In 2020, former Gauteng MEC for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA), Lebogang Maile, said that phase one of the project had been completed.
According to Maile, this phase included constructing various layers of earth materials and installing stormwater drainage systems.
He added that the first phase of the project cost R24.2 million, accounting for more than half of the total project cost.
Five years after Maile’s statement, the Palm Springs multipurpose sports facility remains incomplete, with construction halted indefinitely.
Kingsol Chabalala, a member of the Provincial Legislature, said the facility is currently nothing more than an empty, weed-covered piece of land.
“The municipality does not have a timeline for completing phase 2 of the project due to a funding shortfall,” Chabalala said.
Only after CoGTA, through the Municipal Infrastructure Grant (MIG) office, approves the funding will the municipality be able to provide an accurate completion date.
“The outstanding construction work is estimated to take 24 months,” Chabalala said in a statement.
He said that the half-finished project exposed the ANC in the Emfuleni Municipality’s failures in execution, planning and oversight.
What is particularly concerning is that this issue has been on the agenda for many years, leading to social action last year.
In 2025, the DA submitted a petition to the Gauteng Provincial Legislature (GPL), demanding that the municipality complete the sports facility.
It also called for those responsible for this failure to be held accountable. However, the petition was rejected by the ANC-led Petitions Committee.
“We subsequently appealed to the ANC Speaker of the GPL, but despite numerous follow-up requests, our appeal has been ignored,” Chabalala said.
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Whilst corruption continues unabated which should have been used to uplift the poor who are still living in the doldrums of poverty after 32 years of ANC rule, whilst the political elite lives in absolute luxury in palatal houses, luxury cars with their children in Private Schools. traveling the world and living it up.
Quantifying the exact total cost of corruption and wasteful expenditure since South Africa’s democratic transition in 1994 is virtually impossible due to the hidden nature of the crimes. However, aggregated estimates and official audits provide an undeniable scale of the financial hemorrhaging across the country.
State-Owned Enterprises and Grand Corruption
The Zondo Commission: The Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture found that R57 billion was paid on corruption-tainted contracts to entities associated with the Gupta family alone.
Historical Procurement Leaks: Civil society groups and economic experts have frequently estimated macro-economic leakages (such as inflated tender costs at R27 billion to R35 billion annually.
Historical Aggregates: Organizations like the Institute for Accountability estimated that historical corruption across the post-apartheid government framework may have accumulated to over R700 billion by the mid-2010s, although researchers treat such large cumulative figures as broad estimations.
Municipal and Local Government Waste
The Auditor-General of South Africa consistently flags local, provincial, and national administrations for non-compliance, financial misconduct, and lack of oversight. Local governments specifically have been crippled by:
Irregular Expenditure: Municipalities registered staggering cumulative totals, including R145.21 billion over a recent multi-year stretch, with R40.14 billion recorded in a single recent financial year.
Fruitless and Wasteful Expenditure: Between 2021 and 2026, local government councils alone recorded roughly R24.12 billion in wasteful and fruitless expenditure.
Unauthorised Expenditure: Unapproved and out-of-budget spending by municipalities has amounted to R118.13 billion over the same recent period.
These losses have directly deprived the country of basic infrastructure, contributed to service delivery failures, and severely drained the national fiscus.
For granular year-on-year breakdowns and forensic reports, consult the Auditor-General of South Africa or review investigative findings tracked by the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA).
On top of this the ANC cost unemployment- South Africa’s mining legislation inadvertently fuels illegal mining in the country, which robbed the country of R23.5 billion in tax in 2025. This illegal activity also results in the country losing billions of rands worth of foreign exchange earnings, thousands of jobs, and endangers the lives of citizens. It has grown significantly over the past decade as formal mining companies reduce their exposure to South Africa due to policy uncertainty and strained labour relations. The fleeing of mining businesses has left South Africa with 6,000 abandoned mine shafts, which are now home to illegal operators.
The Corruption and State Capture have deprived the poor people in this country from a better life and future after 32 years of democracy whilst the ANC comrades, Cadres, families and connected friends enriched themselves, which should be classified as a Crime against Humanity. We need to be honest that the upliftment of the poor which is a government duty which cannot be blamed on apartheid nor the minority white people as the above clearly supports that.