Two weeks ago, our council meeting was disrupted by protesters who raised serious allegations against high-ranking officials of the KwaDukuza Municipality, publicly reading out a memorandum containing their demands.
Although the municipality was given seven days to respond, the memorandum has not been tabled at council as yet and there has been no formal response from the municipality regarding it.
Many residents have enquired about ActionSA’s stance with regard to the allegations and demands raised.
Regarding the reinstatement of the CFO, from the time the first investigation report was presented to council, we, together with most opposition parties considered the allegations of financial misconduct against the CFO to be nothing more than a witch hunt.
We were adamant that the allegations were less serious in nature and never deserving of suspension.
Had the ANC not thought otherwise, the allegations could have been dismissed within seven days, and prevented the municipality from incurring wasteful expenditure of more than R1-million in further investigations and disciplinary hearings.
We support the reinstatement of the suspended chief financial officer.
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We also support the memorandum’s request for a probe into contracts awarded by the KwaDukuza Municipality.
We are also of the opinion that irregularities and possible fraud and collusion exists in the awarding of the panels of contractors for the disaster recovery grant.
As a case in point, we conducted our own investigations into the panel of contractors for roads rehabilitation and discovered that three out of the 25 companies on the panel are connected to one family.
We requested the municipal manager to investigate our findings but he subsequently dismissed the matter altogether.
We proceeded to report the matter to the Auditor General and investigations will be forthcoming.
Lastly, we support the call for an independent forensic audit to investigate acts of corruption, tender rigging and bribery by municipal officials.
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