The City of Ekurhuleni municipality chief operations officer Lesiba Mojapelo has conceded the company appointed to upgrade Jimmy Cawood Park in Boksburg South didn’t lay paving on the area.
This is despite a document stating otherwise.
Mojapelo previously issued the Ward 32 councillor Marius de Vos with a letter of satisfaction that the councillor was supposed to sign, following the completion of the project to give the park a facelift.
The letter states that the metro upgraded the park, through the metro’s Lungile Mtshali Community Development Project, at a total cost of R1 000 182-million.
The document also stated as part of the project, municipal contractors installed paving to the tune of over R113 000.
It was later, however, discovered that the said paving doesn’t exist, and as a result the councillor refused to sign the letter, which he then decided to share its content with the community and the Advertiser.
This publication carried out an investigation into the development and ran a story about the questionable costs of the project, including the amount of money said to have been spent on non-existent paving.
Answering questions posed by the Advertiser during his visit to the site, Mojapelo admitted that an error had taken place when drafting the letter, saying incorrect information on the letter issued to the councillor was mistakenly taken from the first Bill of Quantities (BoQ), instead of the final BoQ drafted after the first one was amended.
It turned out that the cost consultant should never have included the paving in the BoQ in the first place, as paving was in fact not meant to be laid on the park in question.
The final draft shows that the only paving installed there is the about a thousand bricks laid around the rectangular perimeter of the outdoor gym area, which costs the metro R34 704.
“We, however, should acknowledge that the letter was the problem. We should have picked up the letter problem and fixed it there, even before it was escalated to other platforms.
“Other than the error, this was meant to serve as a pro forma that I expected you (the councillor) to complete and say you are happy or not happy with the job done and then send it to me,” said Mojapelo.
Mojapelo insisted that there was nothing sinister about the Jimmy Cawood project, adding that they are using a tender that was approved by the city.
“The City has a three-year tender to build parks with the Department of Parks. So we are tapping into an existing tender, and because of the nature of this tender, the department is not allowed to tamper with the rates or prices but can tamper with the quantity.
“When you go there and they say we sell apples for R50, all we can say is we want 50 apples and then pay R2 500. “The rate we can’t change,” explained Mojapelo.
The COO also admitted that they have encountered some shortcomings in the municipality’s project to spend R1-m per ward on the development of parks.
“One of the problems is that we don’t have a standardised design to build our parks. The parks each have a different look because we allowed councillors to decide how they wanted the parks in their respective wards built.”
De Vos, however, said although he is happy that the COO conceded that the paving is non-existent, he still remains unsatisfied with the quality and standard of the services rendered by the contractor.
He is still unsatisfied with the COO’s justification for spending R340 000 on the few pieces of gym equipment and park furniture.
In his closing remarks, Mojapelo described the park as one of the best that have come out of the project.
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