The Department of Public Service and Administration has provided guidelines in that regard. That is being processed and has been processed by the director-general. Furthermore, we have approached the forensic investigation team to look into several transgressions of officials within the department, not least the cases that you referred to. It is a painstakingly slow process. I suppose all of us would like to see it resolved expeditiously.
People who are guilty must face the charges - the consequences, as it were - and those who are wrongly accused must be acquitted of any allegations that might smear them, and so on. In short, we are doing what we can. You must show us what it is that we can do that we are not doing.
Let me also say that all of these transgressions occurred before 10 July 2013 when I was appointed. Yesterday afternoon, for example, we established that somebody who was appointed recently in a senior position seemingly, transgressed the public service regulations in his previous position and was sanctioned for it - in fact demoted. We also discovered that an official in the department was aware of that and there is documentation to prove that. We immediately informed them yesterday and this morning that we are proceeding with the relevant processes against them. So, only yesterday afternoon there was yet another case of a transgression, and we have acted speedily. I am not sure how much faster one can be.
We are very clear when we have to deal with corruption and we will also be very clear that sometimes it could be a case of people not being corrupt but being smeared for political or other reasons. There are feuds that occur within the department. The way people actually settle some of these scores is to wrongly accuse others. Yes, some of these people are legitimately facing disciplinary processes and so on, but others are victims of feuding within the department. So, we have to be careful about how we manage this.
Again, I must say that the one case that we have proceeded against has ended up in a court of law, and the person accused of corruption is now saying that he was a whistleblower and that he is being victimised. So, we are spending endless periods of time rebutting that, and it is costing the department a substantial amount of money. Next, you are going to ask us why we spent so much money on lawyers, when you are in fact also suggesting to us that the cost would escalate if we were to act recklessly on our side.