Sedibeng's vanished R465 000 chain and the price of no accountability

The Citizen

a day ago

EDITORIAL COMMENT – When R465 000 of public money disappears in the form of a ceremonial mayoral chain the very least the public deserves is answers. Two years after Sedibeng District Municipality's gold mayoral chain went missing, those answers are still nowhere to be found. Now we learn, via the Sowetan, that the case has been quietly closed. No suspects. No arrests. No asset recovered. Just silence. It is this silence, and not merely the missing chain, that offends the public most. An asset worth nearly half a million rand, meant to symbolise the dignity of public office, vanishes in the chaos after a State of the District Address in 2023. Yet a case is only opened months later in November.
The public is told little. Internal investigations yield no public report. The police close the file in July 2025, and the National Prosecuting Authority declines to prosecute. Again, no proper explanation is given. This is not how public money should be treated. Whether the chain was stolen, lost, or deliberately hidden, is beside the point now. The issue is that accountability has vanished alongside the chain. As the DA's Kingsol Chabalala has pointed out in a letter to premier Panyaza Lesufi, the circumstances surrounding the disappearance, the delay in reporting, and now the opaque closure of the case all suggest something worse than mere negligence. They hint at rot and the public has every right to be suspicious. The mayor, Lerato Maloka, called for an independent investigation in May. If she meant it, now is the time to push for it. So too must the premier. The asset belonged not to a councillor, but to the people. Its loss is not symbolic, it is financial.
We cannot accept that almost half a million rand can vanish into thin air, and that no one must answer for it.