South Africa's ruling African National Congress has been severely embarrassed by the almost simultaneous exposure of extensive corruption in two provinces by official commissions of inquiry.
Its embarrassment has been compounded by an apparent attempt by one of the two ANC provincial premiers, Dr Mathole Motshekga, of Gauteng, to protect a high-ranking ANC member by issuing a sanitised summary of the report in that province.
In the second province, Mpumalanga, the ANC has, however, sought to salvage its reputation by taking decisive action against officials indicted by the commission.
Faced with evidence that nearly R1 million has been stolen from a provincial legislature account, most of which was traced to the personal account of the Deputy Speaker, Ms Cynthia Maropeng, the ANC has dismissed Ms Maropeng and the Speaker, Mr Elias Ginindza, from their posts.
Ms Maropeng, dubbed the "corruption queen" by the press, has been hit especially hard; she has been evicted from her seat in the provincial legislature and suspended as a member of the ANC pending a party disciplinary committee hearing.
The ANC's action does not preclude the laying of criminal charges against Ms Maropeng, as well as the legislature's finance and administration directors, as recommended by the commission.
In Gauteng, Dr Motshekga is himself under fire for issuing a statement clearing a former provincial minister of safety and security, Ms Jessie Duarte, of corruption and maladministration, although the commission found - on his own admission - against her on several counts.
These include charges that she had:
Driven a government vehicle without being in possession of a driver's licence and then failed to report an accident after being involved in a collision.
Taken a companion to Portugal at the taxpayers' expense and used departmental funds for a trip to Britain without authorisation.
Appointed an unqualified person to a senior position at a salary for which there was, as Dr Motshekga put it, "no justification and basis".
But the actual report, as distinct from Dr Motshekga's synopsis, concludes that Ms Duarte might have been party to an effort to cover up the accident by falsely identifying the driver of the government vehicle as one of her bodyguards. Faced with protests from opposition parties and their intention to hand the commission's report to the Attorney-General, Dr Motshekga has reversed his original decision not to refer the report to the Attorney-General for possible criminal charges against Ms Duarte, a former personal assistant to President Nelson Mandela.
The commission reinforces the widely-held view that malfeasance is a major problem in post-apartheid South Africa. A primary cause is the "culture of entitlement", the belief of many South Africans that they are entitled to wealth and comfort as a form of recompense for past suffering as victims of apartheid.
Mr Mandela has himself expressed concern at the corruption in the new order on several occasions.
Five people were shot dead over the weekend in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province in a series of politically related killings that have left 18 people dead in a week, police said. Gunmen attacked a family sitting around a cooking fire in Magoda township near the town of Richmond in central KwaZulu-Natal, 310 miles south-west of Johannesburg. A 21-year-old woman and her child aged three were shot dead in the attack.