The City of Cape Town has responded to a Wetton workshop owner’s complaints of work drying up by arguing that it does its best to fairly distribute repair work on its vehicles.
The municipality outsources work to approved vendors if it cannot tackle the repairs and services to its fleet, but the team at Wetton Mechanical Repairs believe that repairs are dished out to those who can give kickbacks.
On Mandela Day (July 18) 2017, the owner of Wetton Mechanical Repairs, Nasrodien Gaffoor, gave his staff 67% of his business - a spin on the 67 minutes of good deeds people are asked to commit to doing in commemoration of Mandela’s birthday.
This has now backfired on him, as work from the municipality has dried up and he believes it’s because he’s no longer willing to bribe municipal employees to push work his way.
In response to Gaffoor’s claims, City of Cape Town spokesperson Luthando Tyhalibongo said: “According to our records, this company has been receiving work from the city in the past few months. There was a time when the
company could not be utilised due to changes in its directorship.
“The information on our system could not match that on the Central Supplier Database. Therefore, the company was placed on hold by our supply chain management department until the matter was resolved. As a result, no work can be outsourced to them or any other company that is deemed non-compliant.”
The municipality also provided a worksheet of its records, detailing all of the vehicles it has sent to Wetton Mechanical Repairs in the past
financial year.
But Gaffoor said he’s more
interested in seeing comparisons between the number of vehicles he’s received compared to other workshops in Diep River and Wetton that he believes were still willing to line the pockets of officials to get vehicles into their workshops.
Tyhalibongo said there’s no guarantee of how much work the city would outsource to any vendor, adding that the decision to outsource work was based on numerous factors.
“Availability of work to be outsourced, if any, at any given time, availability of internal resources. Recently, the City has employed a number of artisans to conduct in-house repairs. Work is then outsourced if the internal capacity is reached,” he said.
He added that more than a third of the City’s fleet was new, due to the replacement programme.
These vehicles are acquired with warranties and either maintenance and/or service plans, and are serviced by original equipment manufacturers and therefore cannot be maintained inside workshops or non-franchised vendors.