Icasa left R333.7-million of its 2025/2026 budget unspent, including almost its entire capital budget, even as it told parliament that a lack of money is the main thing stopping it from buying the tools it needs to police operators.
The communications regulator spent just 0.5% of its capital expenditure budget, leaving R130.5-million unused, and left a further R203.2-million of its operating budget unspent. It ended the year with a surplus of R100.2-million, according to the Parliamentary Monitoring Group’s record of Icasa’s annual report briefing to the portfolio committee on communications & digital technologies on 9 October.
Icasa chairman Mothibi Ramusi told MPs that securing adequate funding to source the regulatory tools it requires remains the authority’s primary challenge. He said Icasa’s CEO would deliver a business case by the end of October setting out medium- to long-term priorities, including proactive solutions for network quality and customers’ quality of experience rather than remaining purely reactive.
DA MP Tsholofelo Bodlani said Icasa had admitted that its monitoring tools, including the drive-testing equipment it uses to check operators’ compliance, are insufficient and not fit for purpose. Drive-testing involves measuring coverage and network performance with specialised equipment along set routes. Bodlani said the shortfall prevents the regulator from holding well-funded operators to account, and asked when it would be fixed.
Icasa would not say where the money for its modernisation will come from. Licensing and compliance executive Fikile Hlongwane said discussions with national treasury and infrastructure authorities were ongoing and sensitive, and that funding sources could not be disclosed until agreements were finalised. Bodlani said withholding that information from parliament compromised oversight, and asked for assurance that the funding would not undermine the regulator’s independence.
Ring-fenced
Senior finance manager Moroesi Mooketsa said the surplus arose mainly from grants ring-fenced for Icasa’s infrastructure modernisation and technology projects. Of R588.1-million in grant allocations, R102-million was set aside for those projects, which run over several years. Because the roll-out was still under way at year-end, Icasa applied to national treasury to retain the unspent funds.
Mooketsa said Icasa’s finance and supply chain units were under-resourced for their workload, that tender processes could take up to 120 days and were often delayed by a lack of bids, and that capital projects worth R36-million and the procurement of a new licensing system were under way.
Committee acting chairman Shaik Imraan Subrathie asked the regulator to reconcile its R100-million surplus with its requests for additional state funding.
Icasa’s contingent liabilities more than tripled, from R24.2-million to R82.5-million. Mooketsa said the largest single item was a R28-million claim from Cell C. PMG’s record does not say what the claim related to. Another large component related to CCMA disputes over 2023/2024 performance bonuses.
The regulator improved its audit outcome from qualified to unqualified with findings, and met 40 of its 47 performance targets. Most of the targets it missed were in its finance division. Mooketsa said the indicator descriptions for those targets were internally inconsistent, so management marked them as not achieved even though the underlying work had been done.
MPs also raised the auditor-general’s finding that it could not verify Icasa’s reported performance on resolving radio frequency interference cases because of gaps in the supporting evidence. Hlongwane said the finding stemmed from limitations in Icasa’s case management system, which did not properly separate preliminary assessments from formal investigations.
Hlongwane said the auditor-general made no adjustments to Icasa’s reported figures, and that the authority was moving its customer relationship management system from on-premises servers to the cloud to fix the problem. — © 2026 NewsCentral Media
