A facilities manager at NSFAS has been reinstated after the Labour Court ruled his dismissal was unfair. The senior employee had reported procurement irregularities.
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ALFRED Abrahams, a former National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) employee, is reinstated after the Labour Court ruled his dismissal was unjust. Abrahams had disclosed serious procurement irregularities.
He will be reinstated to his position as a facilities manager.
Abrahams was vindicated by a ruling made by the Labour Court sitting in the Western Cape this week.
Abrahams was unfairly dismissed after he made a protected disclosure to the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), but NSFAS contended and maintained that the dismissal was for misconduct arising from a breach of its Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policies.
Abrahams, as the facilities manager at NSFAS head office in Cape Town, became closely involved in planning the institution’s move from its current offices and worked with the Department of Public Works to determine how much space the organisation needed.
As the procurement process progressed, Abrahams said he became increasingly concerned.
The tender was, however, approved and advertised without sign-off from Abrahams or his immediate manager, which he described as a serious procedural irregularity.
An excerpt from the court documents read: “Abrahams testified that he repeatedly raised these concerns through formal channels. He prepared reports for executives and board committees, highlighted risks in internal submissions, and even recorded these issues in formal risk registers. Nevertheless, he testified that his warnings were largely ignored.”
It was after the president authorised the SIU to investigate irregularities at NSFAS in August 2022 that Abrahams approached the organisation’s internal forensic audit lead, who then advised him to convey his worries about fruitless and wasteful expenditure directly to the SIU, providing them with an account of the procurement process and the irregularities he had identified.
To obtain support for his disclosures, Abrahams gathered documentary evidence and sent these emails to his personal email address and then forwarded them to the SIU.
According to a senior manager in Data Management, who was the sole witness called to testify for NSFAS, submitted that forwarding internal documents to a personal email account “is not a trivial or technical violation, but a serious breach of data governance principles, with inherent risks to confidentiality and organisational integrity”.
During disciplinary procedures that led to his unfair dismissal, Abrahams explained that he forwarded the emails to his personal account out of fear of victimisation and to preserve evidence for potential future proceedings, as he believed he might be targeted once his disclosures became known.
“He further testified that sending documents to personal email addresses was a common practice within the organisation, particularly during the Covid-19 period, and that he did not believe he was breaching any policy at the time…
“Nothing transpired following his disclosures until shortly after February 15, 2023, when the leader of the United Democratic Movement and Member of Parliament, Mr B Holomisa, publicly revealed the same information which Abrahams had conveyed to the SIU. The very next day, NSFAS launched an investigation into how the information was leaked,” court documents read.
Abrahams argued that his dismissal was not genuinely about a breach of policy but was instead a pretext for retaliation.
Abrahams said the Auditor-General report confirmed many of the irregularities he had raised, including procurement failures, missing approvals, and the risk of wasteful expenditure.
He argued this validated his concerns and supported his claim that he acted in good faith as a whistle-blower and was dismissed for exposing flaws in the procurement process.
Further enquiries for comment from NSFAS had not yet been answered.