Durban - The Department of Public Works has called off its internal disciplinary hearings to probe officials implicated in the awarding of contracts for the controversial upgrades on Nkandla.
And executive director of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution Lawson Naidoo on Wednesday told The Mercury this meant that ultimately, no-one would be held accountable for the Nkandla scandal.
“Despite all that we’ve been through,” Naidoo said. “There’s been continuous blame shifting in the whole Nkandla saga from the beginning, from the President downwards.”
Naidoo said it was clear that the cost of the upgrades were “hugely inflated”.
“And it's quite clear there was significant wrongdoing in the process,” he said.
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Shortly after the first Nkandla hearing finally got off the ground, it was unceremoniously postponed until further notice.
Now some two months later, it has emerged that the hearings are off altogether.
The Public Service Association's KwaZulu-Natal manager, Claude Naicker, told The Mercury the hearings had been “dispensed with”.
He said the department had “settled” all 10 of its cases against the Public Works officials.
Naicker could not divulge the terms of the settlement agreements due to confidentiality clauses contained therein but he said all the officials were “back at work, continuing with their duties”.
The hearings have been delayed on several occasions over the past three years.
They got underway in 2014 but had to be put on hold soon after, for Media24, Times Media Group and the Mail & Guardian to apply for media access.
The matter ended up in the Pietermaritzburg High Court and in 2016, Judge Piet Koen eventually ruled in favour of the press.
After that, the hearings were repeatedly postponed until July, when former assistant director at the department in KZN Jayshree Pardesi’s got under way.
Pardesi, who had been on the Regional Bid Adjudication Committee (RBAC) that appointed contractor Money Mine 310 CC to carry out work on President Jacob Zuma’s Northern KZN home, was charged with misconduct for awarding the contract through a “negotiated procurement strategy”.
This meant Money Mine was the only company approached to do the work and - according to the department - that the contract was not awarded following the normal open and fair tender process.
Over the course of two days, evidence emerged that Pardesi should not even have been on the committee that signed off on the tender and that her boss asked her to stand in for him at the last minute.
It also emerged that there were normally several days between the sittings of the Bid Evaluation Committee (BEC) - which evaluates tenders and makes recommendations - and the RBAC - which approves or rejects those recommendations.
But in the case of the Money Mine contract, the entire process appeared to have taken just a few hours.
For the first time, the public was gaining a glimpse into how the events around the upgrades unfolded but then the hearing was adjourned to a date in late August.
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It did not go ahead that day and the department has remained mum on the subject since then.
Spokesperson Thamsanqa Mchunu has ignored a number of emails sent to him querying the status of the hearings and did not respond to another email sent on Thursday.
A source with intimate knowledge of the matter, on Thursday told The Mercury that there had been high level “interference” during the hearings.
The DA’s spokesperson on public works, Malcolm Figg, said the party was going to write to the minister and ask him to explain what had happened.
“The problem we have is that there’s no transparency,” he said. “We insist that there must be complete transparency in the process. That they’ve come to some sort of an arrangement involving confidentiality clauses - It’s unacceptable”.
IFP MP Narend Singh said the matter was of great public interest.
“If needs be we will apply through the PAJA (Promotion of Administrative Justice Act), to have the terms of these settlements made public,” he said.
Meanwhile architect Minenhle Makhanya, who was tasked with handling the Nkandla upgrades, is yet to have his case set down to be heard.
The Special Investigating Unit filed a civil claim for R155.3m against Makhanya in the Pietermaritzburg High Court in 2014 related to the Nkandla upgrades as the unit alleges that it was due to Makhanya direct involvement that the project costs escalated.
Makhanya's new lawyer, Anitha Chetty, yesterday said she could not comment on what the cancellation of the department’s internal disciplinary hearings meant for her client’s case.
She said she had only recently been instructed and was still going through the case.