Fired for exposing municipal corruption in Johannesburg

Sarika Lakraj-Naidoo has paid a high price for more than a decade of blowing the whistle on wholesale looting at the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality.

She began her career with the city in 2008 as finance director of Emergency Management Services. When she became aware of serious financial irregularities, she reported these internally and externally as protected disclosures, including to the mayor’s office, the police and the presidency.

Lakraj-Naidoo continued to supply the authorities with supporting evidence and affidavits, even though she was retaliated against at work for her efforts. It was a decade before a presidential proclamation was issued in March 2019 for the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) to look into the suspect contracts she had flagged.

In November that year Lakraj-Naidoo was appointed to the position of finance director of the Public Safety division. This umbrella department is the City’s largest and employs over 10 000 people. It includes the city police and emergency services as well as its vehicle licencing and camera surveillance divisions.

In her new position, Lakraj-Naidoo came across a slew of suspect contracts. She says she reported these as protected disclosures, internally to her line manager and subsequently to the city’s anti-corruption division and to the late city mayor Geoffrey Makhubo, who told her to take her evidence to the police.

In 2020, Lakraj-Naidoo opened criminal complaints with the police’s priority crimes directorate, the Hawks, covering another 11 suspect contracts worth a total of R5.3 billion (300 million USD).

The same year one grievance was laid against her by an official she had implicated in corruption in the 2019 SIU proclamation and her Hawks complaints. She was also subjected to serious acts of intimidation. These included threatening phone calls, being followed home, abandoning a vehicle in an unfamiliar area after being forced off the road, a car attempting to force her off the highway and spotting people in parked cars taking photographs of her at home.

A medical newsletter has written that the intimidation she faced was “remarkably similar to that received by Gauteng Health [Department] whistle-blower Babita Deokaran before her assassination.”

Lakraj-Naidoo reported these incidents internally and to the police. After threat analyses were conducted by various state police and security agencies, she was assigned bodyguards. But in 2021, shortly after Mayor Makhubu died, her security detail was removed by the city manager Floyd Brink and the city appointed a law firm to investigate her.

The following year Lakraj-Naidoo was served a charge sheet. The offences she was charged with – harassment, intimidation, bullying and gross misconduct – were based on complaints by colleagues and subordinates she had implicated in corruption in her protected disclosures.

After spending millions in legal fees on a protracted internal disciplinary process, the city fired Lakraj-Naidoo instead of acting against the alleged perpetrators she had blown the whistle on.

“I am shaken,” she told News24 after being dismissed in June 2023. “This is what you get for doing the right thing.” By then she had worked for the city for 15 years.

“I underestimated the ANC criminal cabal, and the influence and power of the politicians who loot Gauteng,” she says. “The looting will never stop until there is nothing left.”

In December 2023 she was vindicated when the South African Local Government Bargaining Council cleared her of the trumped-up charges and awarded her 10 months’ salary. Despite ruling that her dismissal was unfair and noting she had an unblemished record, the bargaining council did not recommend her reinstatement because of a breakdown in her relationship with her employer.

Lakraj-Naidoo says while she is thankful for being cleared of fabricated charges, the ruling’s failure to order her reinstatement has left her unemployable because the city refuses to change her dismissal notice to a separation agreement, and she does not have the funds to take the matter to court.

“Now I sit at home without work. I can’t even put food on the table. And nobody helps me. I’ve lost my teeth from the stress. It’s been the most traumatic experience of my life.”

In July this year Zenzele Benedict Sithole, one of the investigators in the city’s anti-corruption division who Lakraj-Naidoo said she had shared information with, was gunned down while driving home in what has been described as a carefully orchestrated hit. Several dockets of cases he was investigating were found inside his car.

City Press newspaper, citing an official privy to the cases the unit is investigating, said one of these was for a vehicle fleet tender the city had awarded irregularly. The fleet tender was among those Lakraj-Naidoo had reported. 

Sithole’s assassination underscores how high the stakes are. “My dear friend Zenzele was murdered due to his job,” she says. “I would hate for his death to be filed away, with the perpetrators not being held to account.”

She believes whistleblowers in South Africa are left vulnerable and unprotected in South Africa. “We are dealt a horrible blow. I thought that the laws of this country would protect me. Instead, I have had every door shut in my face. Nobody cares, nobody helps us. I feel utterly abandoned.”

Sarika Lakraj-Naidoo shares the 2024 Blueprint Africa Whistleblowing Prize.