Durban - The controversial Delangokubona Business Forum has been hauled before the courts once again.
This time the KwaDukuza municipality is seeking an order against the forum and two of its directors - Sibusiso Trueman Mnyandu and Sipho Bonga Shongwe - as well as the Umzansi wo Darkie Business Forum - which it says “conducts its affairs similarly to the (Delangokubona Business Forum) - and its leader, Prof Ngwenya”.
The North Coast municipality wants the forums and their members interdicted and restrained from threatening, intimidating, assaulting or interfering with its employees, contractors, sub-contractors or anyone else acting on its behalf and working on projects in and around KwaDukuza.
The municipality’s head of project management, Sandile Cele, said many of the municipality’s projects aimed to give essential services to the people of KwaDukuza.
“Even slight delays in completion can result in over-expenditure that the (municipality) can ill afford. The people of the area will then suffer,” Cele said.
He said there had been numerous incidents of intimidation, "through the storming of buildings and/or engineering sites” over the past 18 months, in KwaZulu Natal.
“These Mafia-style assaults have been perpetrated by agents of various business forums such as the (Delangokubona Business Forum and the Umzansi wo Darkie Business Forum),” he said.
Cele said such events had occurred in KwaDukuza and that in many instances, individual contractors had approached the courts and obtained interdicts against the forums.
But, he went on, over the past few weeks - particularly since the start of the new business year - various people acting on behalf of the forums had arrived at construction and/ or engineering sites within the municipality’s jurisdiction and made demands.
He said KwaDukuza sites were being targeted and that the municipality had reason to believe that attacks and intimidation would continue.
Cele said that the forums had in the past moved from site to site.
“Accordingly, should (they) be interdicted from a single site only, they will inevitably interfere with another of the listed sites,” he said.
An interim order was granted and the matter is set to come before the court again next month.
Last year, the developers of an R8 billion residential and hotel resort project near Sibaya Casino obtained an interim interdict against various “business forums” - including Delangokubona - after three construction sites were shut down by means of “armed invasions”.
In that matter, it is alleged they demanded 40% of the work in this project and also in the bigger, R50 billion 20-year plan for the area.
The forums, which have now formed a federation comprising up to 60000 members, deny allegations that they are using violence and intimidation as tactics.