The Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP) was designed to provide temporary employment to South Africa's poorest citizens while maintaining public infrastructure. At eThekwini Municipality, the programme became a vehicle for one of the longest-running ghost worker schemes in the country.
**The Scheme**
Officials within eThekwini's EPWP division created fictitious employees — people who existed only on paper — and paid them stipends for work that was never performed. The scheme was not a one-off theft but a systematic operation running from approximately 2008 to 2024.
The mechanics were straightforward: ghost workers were registered on EPWP rolls, attendance registers were fabricated, and payments were processed to bank accounts controlled by the perpetrators or their associates. In some cases, 30 ghost EPWP employees were even migrated from the temporary EPWP system onto the permanent city payroll — transforming temporary ghost stipends into full permanent ghost salaries.
**The R500 Million Loss**
A forensic investigation commissioned by the municipality uncovered the full scale: approximately R500 million in total losses over the 16-year period. This included: - **Fictitious beneficiaries**: People who did not exist - **Deceased beneficiaries**: Payments continuing to dead individuals - **Double-dipping**: Beneficiaries employed elsewhere while drawing EPWP stipends - **Payroll migration**: 30 ghost EPWP workers transferred to permanent city payroll
The R1.2 million figure initially reported was merely the amount for a single batch of ghost workers — the tip of a R500 million iceberg.
**The Arrests**
Three eThekwini officials were arrested: - **Xolani Vilane** — Safer Cities Administrative Manager - **Andile Shangase** — EPWP Facilitator - **Robert Nkosi** — EPWP Recruiter
Together, they formed the operational chain: recruitment of ghost workers (Nkosi), facilitation of their registration and payment (Shangase), and management oversight to ensure the scheme continued undetected (Vilane).
**Why It Matters**
The EPWP exists to provide work and income to the poorest South Africans — people who are most vulnerable to unemployment. Every rand stolen through ghost workers is a rand taken directly from poverty relief. The R500 million lost at eThekwini alone could have provided legitimate temporary employment to tens of thousands of people in a city with unemployment above 30%.
The scheme also demonstrates how ghost worker fraud metastasises: what starts as temporary programme fraud (ghost EPWP workers) migrates into permanent payroll fraud (ghost employees on the city payroll), creating an ever-expanding drain on public resources.