The DA Tshwane Caucus welcomes the disciplinary action taken by the City against five officials who awarded an irregular tender for the upgrade of the Rooiwal Waste Water Treatment Plant to a consortium linked to Edwin Sodi. One of the five officials that have now been suspended, pending a Labour Court application to dismiss them, is Tshwane’s head of supply chain management.
In the past decade, in which Tshwane has accumulated irregular expenditure of more than R10 billion, the same official has been in charge of the Supply Chain Management Division. She has also been implicated in numerous matters, including the Glad Afrika case, but never dismissed.
It is essential that the City completes what has been started on the Rooiwal matter, including cooperation with the SIU and the blacklisting of the consortium that abandoned the project (in addition to being irregularly appointed). ANC businessman Edwin Sodi has become synonymous with corruption, as indicated by the findings of the Zondo Commission. If, as seen in other contracts involving Edwin Sodi, officials or politicians benefited by unduly influencing the outcome of the adjudication process, they should find themselves behind bars.
The Zondo commission made clear the extent of manipulation by the ANC and its cadres of state resources. Through cadre deployment, ANC-affiliated networks of politicians, officials and service providers have survived the party’s defeat at the ballot box in the major metros. In Tshwane these networks are now being dismantled.
As was anticipated, the ANC has already come out against the action taken against the Rooiwal Five. In a statement released yesterday, the party’s regional secretary George Matjila claimed that the municipal council has to be consulted before the City Manager takes disciplinary action. This is not true.
For too long the ANC has conflated party and state. When the Glad Africa matter was brought to the municipal council for investigation in 2019, the ANC blocked the suspension of the then City Manager pending the outcome of a disciplinary investigation.
But none of the Rooiwal Five are so-called section 56 managers. The municipal council did not appoint them. And it would be unlawful for councillors to try to alter the decisions of the City Manager on disciplinary matters within his purview.
The DA and our coalition partners will continue to back difficult but necessary decisions by the City Manager to clean out the rot in Tshwane. Public funds should go towards delivering services to the residents of Tshwane and not towards shady ANC aligned businessmen like Edwin Sodi.