The Tshwane municipality will finally relocate next week as its old Munitoria headquarters, damaged in a fire in 1997, is set to undergo a R10 billion revamp.
This was announced by executive mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa during a press briefing on Tuesday, He said the old Munitoria would be demolished to make way for a new building called Tshwane House.
According to Ramokgopa, the move will be funded jointly by the municipality and private partners in what is said to be a first private-public partnership of its scale in the country.
The entire staff currently based at Munitoria will move to a nearby building in Van der Walt Street, where it will be based for the next two to three years.
According to Ramokgopa, the council will rent the building until the new headquarters built on the existing site is ready for occupation.
Tsela Tshweu Investments, a consortium made up of Standard Bank, Nedbank, Group Five and other smaller contractors, has been awarded the project.
City manager Jason Ngobeni said the new building would place the municipality in a central location instead of the current situation in which various departments were spread across the city.
“It will allow for the municipality to interact with the residents much more easily and we will be able to group various divisions accordingly. But it will also improve the entire node where it will be located,” said Ngobeni.
He couldn’t give an exact amount of what it would cost the city to rent the offices where the council would be located temporarily, saying only that it was “market-related”. But he confirmed that the municipality would fork out approximately R3bn for the new headquarters while the rest would come from the private sector.
Meanwhile, the mayor has promised to crack down on council officials implicated in any form of corruption. This follows the recent suspension of the strategic executive in the Speaker’s office, Mapiti Matsena, after he was implicated in irregularities concerning a marketing contract for the ward committee elections.
“The message is that we will take action against anybody, be it the mayor, members of the executive or anyone (else). We are not going to allow any form of corruption to undermine our efforts to run a clean municipality,” said Ramokgopa.
He said they were also awaiting a decision from the National Prosecuting Authority about whether or not it intended prosecuting suspended deputy police chief Ndumiso Jaca.
Jaca was suspended after he was found to be using two vehicles with the same unregistered number plate.
He initially denied this, saying the BMW X5 and the Harley Davidson motorbike were never driven on a public road. A picture taken with a speed camera in Joburg proved this to be untrue.
“The report compiled by the ICD (Independent Complaints Directorate) has been forwarded to the NPA for a decision on whether or not to prosecute.
“We expect this process to be finished by the end of February,” said Ramok-gopa.
He also defended the legality and integrity of the ward committee elections in the light of Matsena’s suspension, saying the alleged wrongdoing only had to do with the awarding of the marketing contract and not with the elections themselves. - Pretoria News