In the first half of the 2025/26 financial year, the Department of Employment and Labour inspected 187 of its own government facilities in the Free State. Sixty nine percent were non-compliant with the OHS Act. Nearly one in six was shut down or partially suspended. For a board that assumes compliance because nothing has gone wrong yet, this is the number worth sitting with.
In brief
In a media advisory covering the first semester of the 2025/26 financial year, the Department of Employment and Labour reported that it inspected 187 government offices and facilities in the Free State, and found 129 of them, 69 percent, non-compliant with one or more requirements of the OHS Act. Twenty-nine facilities, 16 percent of those inspected, received prohibition notices closing premises or suspending operations. The findings named clinics, schools, Social Development offices, SAPS offices and municipal buildings, with leaking roofs, collapsing ceilings, unsafe electrical installations, no water supply and non-functioning sanitary facilities among the causes. This is the hardest published non-compliance figure we have seen for South Africa, and it is the state inspecting itself. For a board that treats an absence of complaints as evidence of a working system, it is worth asking what an honest audit of your own premises would actually find.
Background
Through 2026, the Department of Employment and Labour has been explicit about a shift in enforcement posture, from paper-based compliance toward demonstrable, evidenced management systems, alongside a substantial expansion of the inspectorate. The Free State figures are a rare moment where that posture turns inward. Provincial Chief Inspector Manelisi Luxande's warning that continued failure will be met with prohibition notices or other legal means was addressed to other government departments, not to private employers. The inspection removes a common argument used to dismiss enforcement risk, that inspectors reserve their severity for the private sector. Here the inspected and the inspector sit inside the same state.
Analysis
Two things make this figure useful beyond its shock value.
The first is what it says about the gap between believing you comply and being able to show it. Government departments are not casual about policy. They have safety officers, procurement processes and reporting lines. A 69 percent non-compliance rate inside that kind of structure suggests the gap was not a lack of intent; it was a lack of a live, checked, evidenced system. Policies existed. Buildings still failed. That is precisely the distinction the Department has been drawing all year between paper safety and demonstrable safety.
The second is what drove the prohibition notices. The findings were not exotic. Leaking roofs, collapsing ceilings, unsafe electrical installations, no water supply, non-functioning sanitary facilities. These are physical building conditions that accumulate slowly and are easy to defer when nobody is measuring them against a compliance standard on a fixed schedule. A prohibition notice does not require a catastrophic failure. It requires an inspector, a checklist, and a building nobody has been actively maintaining against that checklist.
Read alongside the COIDA Amendment Act now in force, which adds a three year claims window and a statutory rehabilitation duty, and the ISO 45001:2027 revision moving toward psychosocial risk as a core requirement, the direction is consistent: the state, the statute and the international standard are all converging on the same expectation, that an organisation can produce evidence of an active, current compliance system, not simply assert that one exists.
Strategic implications: what this means for leaders
The Free State figures are a useful stress test for your own assumptions, regardless of sector.
Ask what evidence exists, not what policy exists. A safety policy on file is not the same as a current risk assessment, a maintenance log, or a dated inspection record. If your evidence for compliance is "we have a policy" rather than "here is our last inspection and what we fixed", you are in the same position the Free State facilities were in.
Treat physical premises as a standing risk, not a one-off item. Roofs, electrics and sanitation degrade continuously. A prohibition notice is rarely triggered by a single dramatic event. It is triggered by an accumulation nobody was tracking against a schedule.
Do not outsource assurance to the absence of complaints. No incident yet is not the same as no risk. The Free State facilities had presumably been operating without major incident before the inspection found them non-compliant.
Separate ownership of the building from ownership of the evidence. Someone needs to be accountable not just for maintaining the premises but for being able to produce the record that shows it is being maintained, on the day someone asks.
The 02X view
Boards tend to treat compliance risk as something that lives in a policy document, reviewed once a year and then filed. The Free State numbers are a useful corrective, precisely because they come from an organisation that had every reason to be compliant and was not, in the majority of cases inspected. The lesson is not that government is uniquely careless. It is that any organisation without a live, checked system will drift toward the same outcome, because buildings degrade continuously and policies do not check themselves. The operating brands we back are built around that same instinct: an assurance system that can produce a current, dated answer to "are we compliant right now", not a document that asserts it once and is never revisited.
Abbreviations
DEL: Department of Employment and Labour
OHS: Occupational Health and Safety
SAPS: South African Police Service
References
- Department of Employment and Labour media advisory, republished by Labour Guide, "Department of Employment and Labour concerned about poor compliance with Occupational Health and Safety Act among government departments in the Free State", 18 November 2025. Link
- United Nations in South Africa, "Beyond compliance, South Africa drives workplace safety agenda", June 2026. Link
- ComplianceHub, "OHS law in 2026: the end of paper safety", 2026. Link
Note on sourcing: the Free State figures come from a single departmental media advisory rather than independent corroboration. They are presented as the Department's own reported statement, which is itself the point: this is the state's account of its own non-compliance, not an outside claim against it.
The full list is published free as the OHS Inspection Register: the thirty three items an inspector can ask an employer to produce, each one against the provision it comes from. No cost and nothing to sign.