Buried in the Public Service Commission’s investigation report into the State IT Agency (Sita), which has been provided to TechCentral, is a finding whose implications neither communications minister Solly Malatsi nor PSC chairman Somadoda Fikeni drew on when they released it in Pretoria on Monday: the instability that hollowed out the agency did not start at board level. It started above it.

The consolidated report, which examined Sita’s governance between 2020 and 2025, finds that “the period from 2020 to 2025 was marked by repeated changes in cabinet ministers, board leadership, managing directors and executive leadership, together with interim arrangements and ad hoc ministerial interventions that appear to have become prolonged rather than exceptional”.

That churn “weakened continuity of authority, action tracking, institutional memory and accountability” – and the report lists “sustained leadership instability” first in its matrix of root causes, describing leadership and governance stabilisation as “a precondition for any credible turnaround programme”. The finding “has ministerial significance”, the report says, “because leadership instability was not merely an HR concern”.

The practical consequences are spelt out. Repeated leadership changes “disrupted implementation cycles and made sustained corrective action difficult”, with new leadership arrangements introducing “changes in priorities and direction, often before earlier initiatives had been embedded”. Where leadership roles are “frequently changed, vacant, acting or contested, decision rights become less clear”: officials may become “reluctant to exercise delegated authority” and routine decisions are delayed. The investigation links this to “decision-making paralysis” inside the agency.

Oversight versus management

Perhaps the most pointed line in the report is its finding that the instability contributed to “difficulty maintaining the practical separation between oversight and management” – the boundary meant to keep a shareholder minister out of the boardroom.

The report makes no findings of guilt against any individual and names no minister – though Malatsi conceded on Monday that there were “some instances where individuals will need to answer for certain actions. But the period it covers coincides with a revolving door in the communications ministry – and with the most consequential ministerial intervention in Sita’s recent history.

Read: ‘Functioning but limping’: PSC lays bare the rot at Sita

In July 2023, then-communications minister Mondli Gungubele dismissed seven non-executive directors after a fallout over then-CEO Bongani Mabaso’s pay. The high court in Pretoria set the dismissals aside and ordered the directors reinstated, and Gungubele’s bid to appeal was rejected by the supreme court of appeal in 2024. Mabaso quit after less than a year in the job. Gungubele now serves as deputy minister to Malatsi.

Nor does the ministerial trail start with Gungubele. Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, who held the portfolio from 2021 to 2023 – following Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams – conceded in court papers that the failure to seek cabinet concurrence on Mabaso’s revised R4.5-million salary offer was “absolutely my mistake as the then minister responsible”: a ministerial-level failure that preceded, and helped precipitate, the board’s sacking.

Communications minister Solly Malatsi. Image: DCDT

The period produced further examples of the “ad hoc ministerial interventions” the PSC describes. A ministerial task team was deployed to clear Sita’s stalled contracts, and its chair, Simphiwe Dzengwa, was installed as acting MD – drawing objections from the Public Servants Association, Sita’s recognised union, over his proximity to politicians and a potential conflict of interest arising from chairing the same task team that was probing Sita’s procurement.

The report’s role-based accountability matrix assigns the first corrective responsibility not to Sita but to the “executive authority” – the minister – whose identified weakness is “leadership and governance instability, including repeated changes in ministers, board leadership, MDs and executive leadership”. The prescribed remedy is a formal ministerial direction letter, a defined reporting cycle and an undertaking to monitor Sita’s recovery as a public sector ICT service delivery matter.

There is stability now, on paper: Sita received its first permanent MD in five years in December, and a permanent board in May. At Monday’s briefing, Malatsi backed both: “We have a very competent leadership in the new board… They have all my support.” Whether that stability survives the next cabinet reshuffle is, on the PSC’s analysis, the question on which everything else depends.

Accountability, qualified

However, the same dysfunction the investigation uncovered also limited the investigation itself.

The investigators conducted no independent digital forensics. Analysis of electronic records “depended on materials lawfully provided through authorised repositories and access channels, rather than forensic imaging or extraction”, the report records.

And Sita’s fragmented record-keeping – missing board packs, incomplete resolutions, records “dependent on individual custodians” – “impaired auditability, accountability, forensic reconstruction and the defensibility of institutional decisions”.

The report concedes that its findings require “measured qualification” where they concern chronology, “role-specific accountability” or causation, because the decision trails are only partially supported by available documents.

Any action against individuals must first pass through an adverse-findings register, legal review and right-of-response processes that the report says must still be developed. And among its immediate priorities is an instruction that preservation notices be issued over Sita’s governance, procurement, HR and disciplinary records – a signal that the evidence trail, such as it is, still needs protecting.

The report ends with a warning that applies as much to the ministry as to the agency it oversees: progress “should not be measured solely by whether policies, plans, committees or registers have been created”, but by whether governance, leadership continuity and service delivery actually improve. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media