Howick - The DA-run uMngeni (Howick) Local Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal continues to uncover rot within its offices while stabilising itself in preparation for stable future.
In its latest update, the municipality’s mayor, Chris Pappas, revealed to IOL that they found that their youth office was a site of gross procurement abuse.
Pappas said that was rife ahead of the November 2021 local elections that saw the ANC dislodged from power and the DA taking over.
He made these revelations after giving an update on accountability and consequence management in the municipality on Thursday.
“There has been overpricing and unfair selection of service providers in the youth office, specially during the period leading up to the 2021 local government elections.
“There has been abuse of the R200, 000 quotation whereby tenders have been illegally split and then process not correctly followed in awarding the contractors.
“Contractors have been paid despite work not being completed.
“There has been deliberate manipulation of the SCM (supply chain management) process to favour certain people,” Pappas said.
Furthermore, Pappas revealed that after their investigation, they have suspended some employees, while others opted to resign.
“Three municipal employees have resigned while two employees are on suspension while their investigations proceed.
“There has been no consequence management at uMngeni.
“We have had to rebuild the structures and mechanisms to implement consequence management.
“These include the Audit Committee, the Municipal Public Accounts Committee, the Municipal Disciplinary Board and the Rules and Ethics committee.
“We have also identified weak internal systems and controls that have made it easy for people to get away with dodgy practices.
“Consequence management is not always about firing or disciplining people.
“We have also found that no training and development has taken place in uMngeni and there are some cases where no corruption or fraud has taken place but it has been genuine error or lack of knowledge.
“In these cases we assess if there was a material loss to the municipality and what corrective action we can take that is fair.
“Our primary goal is to ensure value for money service delivery that is transparent and fair,” he said.
He also revealed that they have started a fresh process to appoint a security company after the previous tender was flagged and their suspicions were confirmed by the provincial treasury.
“The security tender was cancelled after we asked the Provincial Treasury to look into irregularities that we suspected in the process.
“The Treasury confirmed our suspicions and the process was cancelled.
“We have since restarted the process with a new tender correcting the issues that we had found from the first round.”
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