Booking flights, hotels and meals for Eastern Cape education officials earned one tenderpreneur’s company more than R1m a day for 10 months last year, while the department publicly claimed it was too broke to pay its other service providers.
The department authorised payments to Khumzi Investments on 1,317 occasions between January 14 and November 28 last year, totalling R336,556,106.50.
On one day in September it paid the company 17 times, and on one day in November, 68 times.
Those payments formed part of almost R4bn in contracts the department awarded Khumzi over five financial years.
Travel and accommodation make up R3.4bn of that, rising from R211.8m in 2021/22 to R1.17bn in 2025/26.
IOL has been investigating the affairs of Khumzi’s sole director, Sakie Sakhumzi Magele, who in May, took ownership of The Herald, Daily Dispatch and the rest of the province’s former Arena Holdings newspapers.
Magele did not answer IOL‘s questions, and has since blocked the journalist who put them to him.
His attorney, Hector Schoeman of Peyper Attorneys, asked that IOL first hand over the documents the questions were drawn from, and warned of urgent legal proceedings.
Khumzi Investments does not have a working website.
Typing its domain into a browser returns a bare server directory with three folders on it. One is labelled travel. It is empty.
Education MEC Fundile Gade set out the contract figures in a written reply to the provincial legislature, in the course of which he said the department had run short of money to pay its suppliers on time.
“There are delays in payments due to the financial constraints within the department wherein payments are made late or delayed,” Gade said in the reply seen by this publication.
He said nobody had ever investigated Khumzi.
“There are no internal investigations conducted into Khazimla Catering and Khumzi Investments regarding potential irregularities, conflicts of interest or collusive practices in their engagements with the department,” Gade said.
“No payments are currently disputed or flagged as irregular expenditure.”
He signed the reply on October 31 2025, answering Horatio Hendricks, a member of the provincial legislature who had asked what Khumzi and a catering firm, Khazimla Catering, had been awarded over five financial years, and what the work was for.
An angry Gade was confronted with IOL‘s reporting at a media briefing in KuGompo City, formerly East London, on Wednesday, hours after the publication revealed that the department’s 100 most senior managers had been ordered at 4.11am to clear Khumzi’s R18.5m account within four days, on the instruction of head of department Sharon Maasdorp.
“[Maasdorp] has been assigned with delegated functions,” he said.
“The policy is saying the head must pay service providers within 30 days.”
He said he could not say whether the payment run had been “right or wrong”.
Maasdorp was present at the briefing and did not address the payments.
“There is a saying that says dogs are only barking at a moving vehicle. Education is moving,” she said.
Gade said every contract the department awarded lasted five years, and that most carried no fixed value because they were rates based and depended on what it could afford.
Khumzi was one of four travel agencies handling accommodation, meals and transport, and one of seven suppliers on a stationery contract that expired in 2024.
He gave no figures for the other three agencies on that panel.
“The awarding of contracts in the Department adheres to competitive bidding processes and proper procurement procedures in alignment with the provisions of Public Finance Management Act,” Gade said.
“All the contracts prior to award are subjected to scrutiny by Provincial Treasury and validation to ensure that necessary procurement processes are duly followed before making an award.”
The R1.17bn he gave for the travel contract in 2025/26 was the figure at the end of October, with five months of that financial year still to go.
Khumzi held two other contracts with the department, and neither behaved as a stable supply arrangement would.
Learning and teaching support material climbed from R20.5m in 2021/22 to R146.7m in 2024/25, then vanished from the reply. No figure was recorded for 2025/26.
Technical equipment was worth between R35m and R51m a year until 2023/24. In 2024/25 it dropped to R3m. The next year it was back at R55.8m.
Together the three contracts came to R3,952,738,161.18.
Hendricks had asked about a second supplier in the same question, and the answer set Khumzi’s earnings in relief.
Khazimla Catering, appointed alongside 55 other firms for hostel catering, was paid R111,625,392.63 over six financial years across two contracts.
Khumzi, on a panel of four, was awarded almost R4bn.
The payment schedule showed how the money left the department.
Khumzi was paid on 136 separate days last year.
The median payment was R44,291.20, and 279 of the 1,317 authorisations were for less than R10,000, together worth R1.46m, or 0.4% of the total.
At the other end, 42 payments of more than R1m carried R204.5m between them, more than 60% of everything Khumzi received. Ten payments alone made up 45% of it.
Four payments exceeded R10m. The largest, R37,946,423, went through on September 23. Another R35,234,049.30 followed on April 30, and R34,910,452 on July 8.
Each of those three was roughly twice the size of the entire account the department had scrambled to settle in four days that June.
The department’s contract figures and its payment records did not match either.
Khumzi banked R336.5m across calendar 2025. For the two financial years covering that period, Gade reported contract values of roughly R2bn.
Neither document explained why.
The email that triggered the four-day scramble went out at 4.11am on June 26 2025, on the instruction of Maasdorp.
The company was owed R18,485,154.69, and most of it was not yet overdue.
“Dear top management members. See attached as per instruction (sic) of the HOD, all outstanding payments to Khumzi to be concluded,” the email read.
The reconciliation attached to it listed 167 invoices going back to October 2019, spread across 48 directorates and categories from school nutrition to internal auditing.
Twelve of them, worth R1,632,314.10, carried no order number.
An official in the department previously told IOL: “He holds so much influence in the department that even Maasdorp is just a phone call away when he needs to sort out payment issues for his company.
“He is a big guy and calls the shots. No one stands in his way when he wants to speak to the head of department.”
The official asked not to be named for fear of losing their job.
Maasdorp is under investigation herself.
Premier Oscar Mabuyane referred a list of allegations raised by Gade to the Public Service Commission in December, and commissioner Vusumuzi Mavuso held an inquiry in KuGompo City in April.
Those allegations, as previously reported, included that Maasdorp tried to influence a relative’s matric results, suspended and demoted senior officials irregularly, interfered in procurement, and signed off the transfer of R80m set aside to buy a school that was never bought.
One of them is that she suspended a director who refused to sign a contract for a service provider who allegedly bought her a house, or helped pay for the one she lives in.
Mavuso’s report went to Mabuyane and has not been made public.
Magele came to own the newspapers three months before any of this reached the public.
IOL named him as the buyer of the Eastern Cape titles last week, having worked back through vehicle registrations and company filings after Arena Holdings declined to say who had bought them.
Arena group chief executive Pule Molebeledi had told staff on April 30 only that the group was partnering with “an Eastern Cape-based private investment group”.
He did not name the group.
Company filings, obtained by IOL, showed the buyer, Ubuntu Media Holdings, sat unused under the name K2026154195 until it was renamed on the day Molebeledi’s message went out.
Its registered address is Arena’s own head office in Parktown, and until May 5 its only director was Molebeledi. Magele joined the board four days after the papers changed hands, alongside Johannes Hermanus Peyper of Peyper Attorneys in Bloemfontein, the firm acting for Magele.
July salaries at the titles did not arrive on payday, which is the 25th.
After IOL reported on this, their salaries were paid late that Thursday night and in the small hours of Friday last week.
Bongani Siqoko, who edited both the Daily Dispatch and Sunday Times, has since quit as chief executive of Ubuntu Media Holdings.
Magele’s dealings are not confined to education.
Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality advertised last year for a panel of four travel agencies, received 11 bids and appointed Khumzi alone, scoring it 100 and giving its reason in four words, “only responsive bidder”.
Hendricks said this week the DA would refer the Khumzi contracts and payment records to Scopa, and ask the premier and Provincial Treasury to review what the province spends on official travel.
“The Eastern Cape government must explain how one company can secure more than R3.4bn in official travel and accommodation contracts over five financial years, while qualifying learners are excluded from scholar transport because there is supposedly not enough money,” Hendricks said.
“Hundreds of thousands of qualifying learners are still not being provided scholar transport due to the programme being significantly underfunded.
“Scholar transport is critical for poor and rural learners, who have no other means of getting to school.”
He said Scopa should test whether the department got what it paid for, match the contract values against the money that actually moved, and check that every payment was backed by goods or services delivered.
IOL
