Over 3,000 ghost workers have been discovered on the payroll of the state-owned Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA), Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula has revealed.
Mbalula told the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts on Tuesday that the agency discovered the scam through its “Operation Ziveze” last December and had stopped paying them immediately.
“The 3,000 workers that have been found are part of an ongoing process which PRASA called Operation Ziveze,” Mbalula said.
According to him, “none of these people have come forward to claim that they’ve been stopped unfairly – meaning it’s a system of corruption within human resources.”
“Someone has orchestrated the scam to steal money from the organisation, that’s how broken PRASA is. In a normal organisation, you can’t even have one ghost worker,” Mbalula said.
However, the minister did not say when the scam started and how much PRASA has lost to the ghost workers.
NM/jn/APA