Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.
Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.
01 — THE HEADLINE
Firing an offender is not the end — an SA employer just recovered R18 million from a former manager
A former senior director of Student Affairs at the University of Johannesburg oversaw the accreditation of private student accommodation. Two Braamfontein buildings were accredited for 1,441 beds between them. When forensic investigators went and counted, they found only 299.
Between March 2021 and March 2024, the director received 366 payments totalling more than R3.2 million from service providers he was supposed to be vetting (alleged bribes and kickbacks). He was dismissed in March 2024. Last month, the Labour Court ordered him to pay the university R18,184,863.62, plus the costs of the trial.
No bed? Ag, OK, we’ll improvise…
The route most employers never use
Dismissal ends the employment relationship, but it doesn’t get your money back in serious cases. The fact is that where an employee's breach of contract caused you actual financial loss, section 77(3) of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act gives you a separate claim for damages, in the Labour Court, against the person.
UJ used it, and the court found their former director had breached his fiduciary and contractual duties, that his misrepresentations induced the accreditation, and that if it wasn’t for those breaches the university would not have parted with the money.
"Individuals who steal public funds may not use equitable principles in our common law as a shield. Corruption is a malignant cancer that erodes our social and moral fabric. Like all cancer, it must be excised, not rewarded."
What made it stick
Two things, and both are ordinary housekeeping rather than legal brilliance. His contract required him to declare conflicts of interest in writing, annually. He signed one declaration, in October 2020, stating he had no interest in any third party dealing with the university, and never filed another. That single stale form is what the breach was built on.
And the university commissioned forensic work: two investigations, a flow-of-funds analysis matching payments into his account against payments out to the providers, and expert testimony to carry it. Without that, there is no causal chain from his conduct to the rand figure, and no recovery. The court noted the timing was damning on its own: money landed in his account within days of the university paying the providers.
WHAT TO DO NOW
Put a fresh conflict-of-interest declaration in front of everyone who touches supplier selection, annually, in writing. If your people signed something in 2020 and nothing since, you have the same gap the university had.
Quantify the loss before you finalise the dismissal. The claim stands or falls on a provable link between the breach and a rand figure. Know that number.
Commission the forensic work when the sum is material. It is expensive, and it is the reason this claim succeeded. Weigh it against what you are writing off.
02 — TOOL OF THE WEEK
One tool shaping how people work
CYBERSECURITY / THREAT EXPOSURE
Find out which risks actually matter
The usual security report hands you a thousand critical vulnerabilities and no way to choose between them, which is a polite way of doing nothing. Snode is a Centurion-built cyber defence firm, founded in 2016, whose Guardian platform now monitors around 8 million devices across six continents. Its pitch is prioritisation: continuous threat exposure management, so you know which handful of gaps are worth acting on this week.
Founder and CEO Nithen Naidoo puts the goal as security teams leaving the room knowing precisely which exposures matter and what to fix first. For a boss, that is the difference between a security budget you can defend and one you sign off on faith.
03 — LEADERSHIP STORY
The dismissal your own disciplinary code would not allow
An employer took a shop steward through a full disciplinary process, found him guilty, and dismissed him. The CCMA and Labour Court called it fair, but the Labour Appeal Court didn’t agree: it reinstated the man with back pay, and the reason had almost nothing to do with the merits.
The argument started because a union member had been dismissed without a hearing. In the row that followed, the shop steward accused a manager of racism, repeatedly and angrily, and was charged with several offences. The Labour Appeal Court found the CCMA had applied the wrong test, asking how the manager felt rather than whether the words were objectively racist in the context they were spoken.
Reported by Monique Jefferson of law firm DLA Piper, the court held that in that particular workplace, where the trigger was a colleague being fired without a hearing, the accusation was not inherently racist.
Then came the finding that should worry every employer. Even if he had been guilty, dismissal was not an available sanction under the company's own disciplinary code. The employer reached for a penalty its own rules did not authorise.
Better take a short pause here, as every employer in SA goes to review their policies quick…
None of this is about whether racism charges stick. They do. It is about two failures that cost this employer a reinstatement order, and both are administrative: someone was dismissed without a hearing, and the sanction did not match the code.
The question worth sitting with: Pull up your disciplinary code. For the charge you would most want to dismiss someone over, does it actually list dismissal as an option?
04 — THE STAT
138
is the median number of applications per vacancy at South Africa's leading graduate employers this year, the highest on record, according to the SAGEA Employer Benchmark 2026, against a median of 4,100 applications in total per employer. Just one in eight applications got through to the next stage.
Silver lining: these same employers are still expanding, with a 4% increase in graduate positions planned for next year.
Source: SAGEA Employer Benchmark and Candidate Insights 2026
05 — EVENTS
What’s coming up
1 OCTOBER – ONLINE
How AI-Assisted Teams Actually Build With AI
A free online hour hosted by OfferZen: a framework for gauging your team's AI-enablement level, a live demo of planning and building alongside an agent, and a straight panel on hiring and team design in the AI era.
1 OCTOBER – ONLINE COURSE
Incident Investigation of Work-Related Injuries and Diseases
A one-day interactive course on recording, reporting and investigating workplace injuries, which is a legal duty most employers only confront after something has already gone wrong.
1 OCTOBER – BALLITO
Buying Back SA Tech from Durban
The Open Letter comes to KwaZulu-Natal for the first time: Pedro Casimiro, Business Lead at Gumtree South Africa, on why Ignition Group bought a 25-year-old classifieds brand back from its offshore owner, and what has changed since.
Got an event SA employers should know about? Reply and tell us.
06 — QUESTION OF THE WEEK
When did the people who choose your suppliers last put a conflict-of-interest declaration in writing?
07 — BROUGHT TO YOU BY
PREMIUM SPONSOR
Jem helps South African employers manage and support their deskless, frontline teams: payslips, leave, HR admin, team comms and financial-wellness benefits (including earned-wage access), all over WhatsApp. Trusted by 200+ employers and 250,000+ workers.
This space is reserved for a small handful of partners we're glad to stand behind, and we've kept 4 more spots open. If your product belongs in front of South African business owners, hit reply and let's talk.
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