National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) CFO Okuhle Sidumane is confident that balance will be restored at the agency within the next three years, after a difficult financial year.
When Okuhle Sidumane was appointed CFO at the NYDA in January 2025, she knew treacherous terrain lay before her.
The NYDA's nine-year clean audit record was disrupted in the prior financial year (2023/2024) which also led to challenges in complying with PFMA financial reporting requirements and timelines.
One of the biggest challenges Okuhle faced in her new role was rebuilding trust, first with a heavily demoralised team, and at a public level, the latter being more difficult.
The finance team had its backs against the wall. As is often the case in businesses, when things go wrong, it always comes back to the finance department. It was no different at the NYDA, she reflects.
Okuhle found her finance team thoroughly disheartened in the aftermath of an unfavourable audit outcome, further exacerbated by the general lack of faith and trust from South African citizens regarding ethical practices within state institutions.
Under scrutiny
“Being able to restore the confidence of each accountant on the team became critical,” Okuhle explains.
She also needed fresh eyes and new blood if she was to steer the agency back to favourable terms with the AG. Okuhle then enlisted the help of a CA she had met during an Executive Day, who joined the department.
With the NYDA finance department still under scrutiny for the negative audit outcome, Okuhle switched gears, encouraging the team to silence out the noise and buckle down to fix the problem.
“Being able to keep the team together during a very tough audit season was incredible,” Okuhle said.
The team also had to be realistic about what they could achieve in the space of a year. She says they had to sit down and gain a thorough understanding of the root causes with particular focus on the internal control environment deficiencies of the prior financial year, before throwing out quick-fixes and random solutions.
A successful turnaround
Together with her team, Okuhle set out to redo the 2023/2024 financial statements, designing and testing new detection systems and bringing about improvements to the internal control environment to change management.
Then, after months of sleepless and difficult nights and stressful bi-weekly meetings with the oversight committees, Okuhle and the team were able to present a more stabilised balance sheet to the authorities, and successfully turnaround the audit outcome for 2024/2025.
“We are not out of the woods yet. When an issue of this nature arises and to this extent, we need about three years of stability to make sure we are out of the woods comfortably.”
Okuhle also found that taking ownership of legacy-created problems strengthened her determination to get the NYDA back to good standing with the oversight body. After promising herself she would never say the problems predated her appointment, and were thus not her doing, she began to work more closely with the auditors.
“I learnt a lot of tricks on how to work with the auditors. We always say auditors are our enemies, I had to make them our friends. Focusing on combined assurance was my anchor,” she adds.
The next task, after rebuilding the team’s confidence, was restoring public trust in the NYDA. Okuhle, who also sits on the national public CFO forums and is an independent audit and risk committee member in one of the SETAs, reports that more finance leaders are keen to restore public confidence in government institutions.
“As CA’s we are humans and citizens first. I also pay taxes. So I work with money that I have paid towards taxes and it has become really personal for me,” Okuhle states.
She says accountants in the field are synergising with the AG to come up with practical solutions to historical problems.
“I think everyone wants to get the public sector back on track in all spheres, particularly towards ethical, accountable and compliant financial reporting processes and systems,” concludes Okuhle.
