Mpumalanga’s main business funding agency has become a cash cow for inexperienced entrepreneurs who take loans and vanish.
The Mpumalanga Economic Growth Agency (MEGA), created to support small businesses and drive development, is bleeding public money.
A damning parliamentary report shows that MEGA has failed to recover over R285 million in loans and other receivables.
Loan beneficiaries, many of them start-ups with limited capacity, simply took the money and never paid it back.
Prescribed debt claim period
“The debt claim must be prosecuted within three years. It’s now past five years,” said Scopa (Standing Committee on Public Accounts) chair Desmond Moela.
Scopa believes MEGA allowed defaulters to slip through the cracks by failing to act before legal deadlines expired.
“The prospect of success in this case is too limited, because of the Prescription Act of 1969,” Moela said.
MEGA continued approving loans and disbursing funds despite warnings about poor repayment patterns and rising risk exposure.
Some of the unpaid loans were linked to the Government Nutrition Programme, where companies were paid but never delivered.
The report says MEGA was warned in 2021 but waited too long to start recovering the money.
By then, most debts had expired under South Africa’s three-year legal window for collection.
Instead of recouping funds, MEGA has now accumulated R248.6-million in irregular expenditure.
In the last financial year alone, R18.1-million was spent irregularly. This was often through unapproved contract extensions.
Procurement rules were flouted, local content thresholds were ignored, and scoring criteria were misapplied.
Culture flourished without accountability
Scopa said MEGA allowed this culture of non-compliance to flourish without enforcing accountability.
“Disciplinary action must be taken against all officials who violated the PFMA and Scopa resolutions,” Moela said.
Yet the agency admitted that most of those responsible had left. Also that others only received verbal warnings.
MEGA also lacks a permanent chief financial officer and several key managers.
This has raised further concerns about whether the agency has the skill to manage public money responsibly.
Deputy board chair is disgraced ex-Communications Minister
Of concern is the presence of Dina Pule, MEGA’s deputy board chair and former Minister of Communications.
Pule was dismissed from cabinet in 2013 after abusing state resources to benefit her romantic partner.
Her return to a leadership role has coincided with MEGA’s deepest financial crisis to date.
Opposition parties are now calling for the agency to be shut down entirely.
“The Premier needs to act now and disband MEGA,” said DA MP Trudie Grovè-Morgan.
“This agency has neither the necessary skills nor expertise to be at the forefront of economic growth.”
Premier Mandla Ndlovu has not acted on Scopa’s recommendations or calls for action.
Attempts to get comment from provincial government spokesperson George Mthethwa were unsuccessful by the time of publishing.
Overhauling MEGA is long overdue. Big industrial sites in Siyabuswa were left idle since the dawn of democracy in South Africa.
Employees who were in charge by then, knew exactly what they were doing. If you can investigate the matter properly you will find that they benefited a lot from MEGA Monies, I believe they recruited their families and friends to apply and that’s where mismanagement of funds occured. U will find that those who benefited a lot have already left the Company.
They must find a way of recovering that money, there are businesses whom are seriously in need of that money to upgrade their businesses. SA is corrupt country. I don’t believe that they failed to recover the money, it was not even strategized to plan on how to recover the money if those business people fails to pay.
Andries Skhosana Mega
Since the down of democracy ekangala with with more than 250 factories Empty no movement at all people of ekangala / siyabuswa please wake up you have got Infrastructure GO Overseas hunt investors. Afriforum fundani from them. 4th april 2025 6am