Waseem Carrim helped the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) tighten its financial controls and shorten the wait for business grants. His next job, at the Road Accident Fund (RAF), will test whether he can do the same for accident victims. At the end of June, the fund owed claimants R22.18bn on claims it had settled but not paid, and that queue had grown by R3.6bn in three months.
The cabinet approved his appointment as CEO on September 23, subject to verification of qualifications and security clearances. Carrim arrives after a period of churn: in August, DA MP Chris Hunsinger told parliament’s transport committee that the fund had had four chief executives in seven months.
A chartered accountant, Carrim joined the NYDA as CFO in 2014 and became CEO in 2018. The agency, which gives grants and support to young entrepreneurs, recorded nine consecutive clean audits through 2022/2023, during his tenure. Within two years, it had cut grant processing from about three months to 21 days.
His record as acting CEO of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), from March 2025, is less conclusive. In March 2026, higher education minister Buti Manamela credited the scheme with clearing its backlog of late financial submissions. The same statement recorded a disclaimer audit opinion for 2024/2025 and nine material irregularities, which it attributed to years of leadership instability.
In May, NSFAS was placed under administration again. Three months later, the Pretoria high court suspended the administrator’s appointment and reinstated the board, pending a review. Carrim told IOL last week that the upheaval gave him “a negative sense that there would never be stability at NSFAS”.
The RAF compensates people injured in road accidents, as well as the dependants of people killed, where negligent driving is involved. It is financed primarily through the RAF levy imposed on fuel.
In the three months to June, the fund paid out R8.9bn on 80,665 claims, but, by the end of that month, still had 301,203 open claims at June 30. The unpaid R22.18bn amounts to more than 40% of the R50.1bn it collected from the fuel levy in 2024/2025.
National Treasury figures show the RAF settled only 9.6% of “new compliant personal claimed products” within 120 days in 2024/2025. These are parts of claims, and settlement is not payment.
In 2024/2025, the fund received R50.1bn in net fuel-levy revenue and paid R42.6bn in claims, according to its originally published accounts. Those accounts nevertheless received an adverse opinion from the auditor-general (AG), the third in a row. The AG found that claims liabilities were understated by an amount it could not quantify without an actuarial valuation.
The adverse opinions stemmed largely from the fund’s use of an accounting standard the AG rejected for its claims liabilities, which it contested in court. In February, interim board chair Kenneth Brown told parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) that the RAF had dropped its legal challenge.
At the August briefing, the fund told MPs it had since returned to the accounting standard prescribed for public entities and restated its financial statements, with an impact of about R490bn. It said it had moved from an adverse to an unqualified audit opinion, though that is not necessarily a clean audit.
The accounting fight was among the reasons transport minister Barbara Creecy gave for dissolving the previous RAF board on July 15 2025. She also cited the handling of former CEO Collins Letsoalo’s suspension and repeated default judgments. The RAF has meanwhile been subjected to an extensive Scopa inquiry into allegations of maladministration, financial impropriety, and misuse of public funds.
There have been some signs of operational improvement. Transport committee chair Donald Selamolela said in February that the RAF was making progress in stabilising operations and governance, but warned that concerns about its organisational structure remained.
Scopa chair Songezo Zibi welcomed the appointment, but said filling the CEO position is only one part of the repair job required at the institution. He called the appointment “long overdue” and urged the minister to appoint a permanent board.
“The RAF has been hollowed out over the years and now poses a significant fiscal risk as a result,” Zibi said.
For Carrim, the immediate challenge will extend well beyond producing a cleaner set of accounts. He inherits an institution that has to restore financial controls while simultaneously processing hundreds of thousands of claims and rebuilding relationships with parliament, the AG, and accident victims.
The appointment of a permanent board, as Zibi noted, will be the other crucial piece of that reconstruction.
