Durban - They came to court hopeful of obtaining an order forcing the eThekwini Municipality to give them the Manase report, but 300 retrenched Durban bus drivers left empty-handed and out of pocket after being ordered to pay the city’s costs - as much as R100 000 - for the failed application.
The bus drivers are involved in litigation against the municipality, in which they are demanding reinstatement or claiming damages after being retrenched in 2008.
They allege corruption when the city privatised the bus service, handing it over to Remant Alton for R70 million in 2003, and then buying it back five years later for R405m.
With that case set down in August this year, the drivers, with no formal legal assistance, approached the Durban High Court in a separate application asking for an order forcing the municipality to release the report.
In an affidavit before the court, their spokesman, Michael Biyela, said the drivers believed it would shed light on alleged fraud around the Remant Alton deal, boosting their other case.
Biyela claimed they had used the Promotion of Access to Information Act to get the report, but had “exhausted all avenues”, and had now been forced to go to court.
But the application was doomed from the start.
Judge Piet Koen pointed out at the start of the proceedings that the drivers had not complied with all the provisions of the act, in that they had not lodged an appeal against the city’s refusal to supply them with the report.
This, the judge said, had to be done, even though they claimed they had not done it because it was a “waste of time” and others, including the IFP and AfriForum, had failed in similar applications.
“You are a lay person. I do not want to be unfair to you. But this stands in the way of your application. As much as I believe in transparent government, this is not something I can just grant. I am bound to apply the law,” he said.
Advocate Gardner van Niekerk SC, for the municipality, pointed out that the drivers had not made any application to the city for the report under the act.
And anyway, he said, such an application would have to be made to MEC of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Nomusa Dube, who had now placed on public record that she would tender it should anyone ask for it.
Regarding Biyela’s request that the drivers be allowed to withdraw their application and each party pay its own costs, Van Niekerk said the city had pointed out the defects in the application in December last year, and had extended an invitation to the drivers to withdraw it with no cost implications.
This had been turned down, and the drivers had instead set it down for hearing.
But Biyela said they were “victims”, had lost their jobs and been financially destroyed.
They had spent R200 000 on lawyers, and many could no longer afford to send their children to school. They had never got any answers as to why they had lost their jobs.
The judge said that, while he empathised with their situation, those were not the issues before him.
Regarding costs, he said courts were loath to award costs against parties seeking to enforce their rights, but the drivers had wrongly persisted with the application after December last year.
He ordered that each party pay its own costs up to that time, and that the drivers pay the city’s legal costs from then up to Thursday’s hearing, which, a legal source said, could amount to R100 000 if the city chose to enforce the order.
The Mercury