LIMPOPO – The council suspended the former Acting Municipal Manager, Johaness Kanwendo and the Director of Community Services (name) after they played a central role in investing more than R150 million of municipal funds with VBS Bank. The opposition parties want the mayor, as well as the former CFO, Reuben Radzilani and other officials to be dismissed.
Kanwendo now has seven days to respond and supply reasons as to why he should not be suspended. This did not go down well with opposition parties and their representatives argued that the mayor must take responsibility for what had happened. The EFF members were very critical of the role the Speaker of the council, Cllr Lindiwe Mohale, played during Tuesday’s meeting.
EFF Cllr Anthony Matumba accused the Speaker of turning the council into her own spaza shop.
“She removes items on the agenda on her own and also takes illegal decisions which favour herself and those close to her,” he said.
Matumba said the EFF’s view was that the municipality must wait for a forensic investigation to be completed. “Those who are implicated must face the law,” he said.
Cope’s representative in the council, Cllr Edward Malema, said that they believed this provided a perfect opportunity for the council to prove to the ratepayers that the cancer of corruption did not have a place in society any longer. He warned that the provisional suspension of Kanwendo should not be seen as the final step the council had taken in dealing with the matter.
“Service delivery has been compromised to a degree where there are no projects taking place. Makhado Municipality needs new political and administrative leadership,” he said.
The DA Councillor Geoffrey Tshibvumo said that the ruling party continued to defend the indefensible.
“The mayor has shown no intention to deal with the VBS saga. She continues to defend the illegality of the deposits made to VBS. She should have acted a long time ago,” he said. Tshibvumo said that the continued
refusal to act resulted in a municipality where employees thought they could perform malpractices, and nothing would be done to them. He said that the ruling party would continue to defend corruption and all the anomalies by using their power of numbers inside the council. “The DA caucus in Makhado will not rest until all the people who are involved in the VBS saga are held accountable,” he said.
