DPW budget will not benefit the poor, it will benefit the President

Honourable Chairperson, allow me to use the words of wisdom by, Caesar Chaves:
“History will judge societies and governments — and their institutions — not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless”.
Honourable Chairperson, on the 1st of April 2017, South Africa woke up to an unprecedented cabinet reshuffle.
To our dismay, unfit, notorious, and corrupt ANC Ministers remained in the cabinet while competent and incorruptible Ministers were substituted with the young lions with no teeth.
To us it has become clear that the redeployment of Minister Nathi Nhleko to this department is to continue with the second phase of Nkandla.
This is a testament that the budget of this Department will not benefit the poor and the vulnerable people of South Africa but only the President and his ANC cronies.
It is actually regrettable that the Department of Public Works is permanently under a cloud of corruption scandals. This is a great pity, seeing as this department has the potential to contribute to the built environment and the economy of this country.
Minister, you and your predecessor were amongst President Zuma’s men, in the Nkandla cover up scandals and you continue to do so.
The DA finds it highly suspicious that the new Minister, mysteriously cancelled a press briefing scheduled for the 25 April 2017, which was supposed to explain the new upgrades and improvements planned at President Zuma’s private homestead in Nkandla.
Despite the confirmation from both senior Public Works officials and the Minister of Police that these upgrades are going ahead.
The public needs to be taken into confidence, they have the right to know how their tax money is spent. They also need the assurance that there will be no further upgrades at all at Nkandla.
This “Mantashing” by the Minister is very suspicious and strongly suggests that there is something to hide. South Africans have not forgotten the role you played in defending the Nkandla scandal from the beginning, most notably your infamous innovation of the ‘Fire pool’.
The DA strongly urges you to avoid a similar performance going forward.
Honourable Chairperson, in a written response to a DA parliamentary question, Minister Nhleko has revealed that 8 of the 14 companies contracted to carry out the notorious upgrades to Nkandla have since been rehired by the Department to perform other work. It would seem then that there has been no accountability.
He also confirmed that not a single one of the 14 companies involved in these upgrades have been blacklisted. This is a shocking revelation considering that the Constitutional Court found these upgrades to be fraught with corruption and unlawful enrichment. It clearly proves that the more connected and corruptible you are, the more valuable to the ANC government you become.
Honourable Chairperson, one of the Department’s entities, the Property Management Trading Entity was established in April 2006, with the prime focus of executing all property management related functions, such as maintenance of properties and property rate payment on behalf of the Department of Public Works.
However, it took the Department of Public Works 9 years to operationalise this entity.
The Department indicated that this entity has a 39% vacancy rate in critical positions. It does not have the specialist skills to ensure the sustainable operationalization of excellent property management.
This entity of the South African government can make the most appropriate property investment for a developing country.
The DA calls on the new Minister to make sure that this important entity is well resourced with the specialised skills required, to fulfil its mandate. This is an entity that accounts for half of the budget of the Department.
Honourable Chairperson, it is really disturbing that another entity of the department; the Independent Development Trust is in a crisis. This trust plays a crucial role in the delivery of social infrastructure in provinces, where there is a dire need and substantial backlog of facilities such as schools and clinics.
However since 1997 this entity:
• Has had a number of leadership challenges.
• Loss of critical staff in key areas of financial administration and management and as a result the entity struggled to collect management fees for all the projects it has been involved in.
• The frequent changes in leadership of client departments threatens the continuity in the IDT’s delivery of programmes and meeting of obligations to service providers.
• The budget cuts and the deliberate delays in transfer of funds by the clients’ department exposes the IDT to litigations due to late processing of service providers.
• For the past three financial years this entity has received a negative audit opinion/ disclaimer from the Office of the Auditor- General.
• The entity does not show any profit.
Honourable Minister, the DA is calling on you to transform this entity so that it can fulfil its mandate or we should scrap it once and for all. Let’s make sure that the tax payer’s money is used effectively.
Honourable Chairperson, when the DA gets into government we will make sure that state resources are used in a responsible and transparent manner. We are already doing this in the cities where we govern.
We will make sure that state resources benefits the poor and vulnerable people of this country. Leaders will not use their positions of power and state resources for self-enrichment when the DA governs.

Millions in taxpayer money to be spent on Nkandla

Note to Editors: The following speech was delivered in Parliament today by the DA Shadow Deputy Minister of Public Works, Dianne Kohler Barnard MP, during the Budget Vote on Public Works.
Colleagues,
There are massive issues in the Department of Public Works, but Minister Thulas Nxesi and his team were slowly but surely turning this shipwreck of an entity they inherited from the previous Minister, around.
Sadly the current President decided to shift this man behind the success story and put in his place South Africa’s Cecil B. DeMille award-winning producer of the world famous 2015 Nkandla Firepool movie.
It’s difficult not to wonder just how handy it will be for this Minister to finally control exactly how much more of taxpayers’ money will be spent on the KZN palace of corruption.
Indeed just 24 days after his appointment his department were frantically denying a Times newspaper story about further plans to lavish more as-yet unknown millions on the Nkandla homestead, which has already been upgraded at a cost of R246-million.
As a committee we’ve seen the sad departure of our stellar chairperson, the now Deputy Minister Ben Martins, congratulations on your promotion, Sir. But we do have a newly elected chairperson who for some bizarre reason is an acting-chair – why?
Just for once, please appoint an eminently suitable chairperson without first waiting month-after-month on permission from Luthuli House.
A year ago I raised the issue of 24 affidavits where individuals were refused EPWP jobs by three ANC Councillors, two men and a woman, from Illovo and uMlazi – because they didn’t have ANC membership cards.
This is of course just the tip of the iceberg, but I received from the Department a carefully worded letter in answer.
However, I know full well that Ward Councillors across ANC run municipalities, and certainly in eThekwini, are mandated to and do hand out EPWP job opportunities.
Further proof of the corruption and political influence that permeates the EPWP, certainly in one of the last few Metros the ANC still controls for now – eThekwini – was proven when a DA Councillor walked into an EPWP meeting at the ICC on the 7th March. He was ordered to leave by the eThekwini mayor, as it was “an ANC caucus meeting”!
Despite the fact that I have been assured over and over again by Deputy Minister Cronin that the EPWP does not see work opportunities given only to ANC cadres, what happened in Durban indicates that I have been misled. All eThekwini EPWP workers were in the meeting, and the Mayor, we are informed, went on to promise to extend the EPWP contracts until the work opportunities became permanent jobs.
It is abuse, clear and simple.
The proliferation of EPWP job opportunities for the people of all the DA-run metros is a priority. Tshwane’s new DA Mayor is determined that the EPWP does not repeatedly benefit the same group of individuals to the exclusion of others. In Johannesburg, Mayor Herman Mashaba is determined that the EPWP does not repeatedly benefit the same group of individuals to the exclusion of others.
His approach completely excludes councillors from involvement in the recruitment process. This is a DA solution to avoid any possibility of the programme being abused by certain parties for political purposes and vote-buying.
The ability to work is key to personal dignity, and DA Metros are committed to creating opportunities for more people to find jobs, earn money and support their families.
Then there are the construction site invasions of KwaZulu-Natal. There is a feeling that the Police have done virtually nothing about this. Both government and private construction sites are invaded, and, for example, the R8-billion residential and hotel resort project near Sibaya Casino was shut down by armed invasions.
Over and over, at site after site, the perpetrators arrive lead by Delangokubona – 15 vehicles, 50 heavily armed people – invade, and demand that 40% of the work of a legally appointed tender be handed over.
It is irrelevant to them that construction companies have followed all protocols promoting opportunity for community upliftment and skills development. The invaders announce that they will not allow work to continue until they are handed the tender.
The installation of bulk sewage and water services was stopped. Construction at the Sibaya project stopped. Construction at the R1,8 billion Sun Coast development has been abandoned. Business operations are simply being shut down all across KZN, and these invasions, it is claimed, will soon reach the EC and Gauteng.
As long as these invasions are swept under the carpet, jobs will be lost.
Now to look at the Property Management Trading Entity, and the Immovable Assets Register. The national register is getting there. But to track down the ownership of an abandoned Government building is an exercise in chasing your own tail.
The Province hands your query to a municipality, who hands it to national, who hands it back to the Province. These are the buildings which are 15% of the immovable assets which should basically be condemned. That is some 17 000 buildings – abandoned, invaded, rat and lice infested, or sold by criminals using fake papers which has led to over 1200 properties lost altogether.
Having such a building in a residential area ensures that a slum is created and property prices destroyed. Finding out which level of Government owns it is a massive undertaking.
I revealed a year ago that there were rather strange co-ordinates for many of the listed properties: I had details of over 200 such properties with GPS co-ordinates showing them settled at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Those I referred to were from a single province.
Of course the Department frantically denied all this, but I know what I have. I also know there is a dedicated team trying to make a credible database of state-owned properties.
Operation Bringback is underway – nationally and provincially. 10 illegally transferred properties have been located; 10 other properties were referred to Gauteng government – where valuable properties were simply fraudulently exchanged for cheap properties.
The team has also examined the deeds records to look at 41 DPW employees who actually bought DPW properties, and have determined there are 2000 illegally occupied properties. Yet we rent buildings for departmental offices.
Possibly one of the most shocking facts revealed to the committee has been that R212m per MONTH is what we pay on leases.
1200 lost buildings, 17 000 derelict buildings, and we fork out R2,5 billion each year on renting private buildings – rentals paid to unknown bodies – unknown because I have asked but never received a reply as to who these property owners are.
The ANC government is making a connected few millionaires while Government-owned properties rot.
Finally the issue of no rates or services having been collected from certain government buildings over the past nine years. The debt nationally came to over R5,241-billion running back to 2008.
A year on and the DA now heads up numerous metros and municipalities, and has discovered that as with Cape Town when we took it over, no rates or services had been collected from government buildings. Money in terms of rates, equals the ability to deliver services. So we are collecting them, and we are delivering.
Much work needs to be done, much corruption needs to be rooted out, but meanwhile I’ll await the new movie: Nkandla – the Sequel.

8 of the companies contracted at Nkandla are still doing business with the State; none blacklisted

The Minister of Public Works, Nathi Nhleko, has revealed that 8 of the 14 companies contracted to carry out the infamous upgrades to Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla homestead have since been rehired by the Department to perform other work, notwithstanding their involvement in the R250 million scandal.
The Minister also confirmed that not a single one of the 14 companies involved in these upgrades has been blacklisted, or “placed on the restricted supplier database”.
In his reply to a DA written parliamentary question, the Minister of Public Works confirms that according to the records at the Department’s disposal, from 1 August 2014 to date, the following companies who were involved in the Nkandla upgrades have been contracted by the Department:

Name of Company Company Registration Number
Otis – Reg. No. 1948/030021/07
Pro-Hydraulics – Reg. No. 1991/032516/23
Mustapha Cachalia Engineering – Reg. No 2000/011218/23
Ilangalethu Consult / R/G Consulting – Reg. No. 2003/086502/23
Bonelena Construction Enterprise and Projects – Reg. No. 2005/07916/23
 
E Magubane – Reg. No. 2006/056588/23
CA Du Toit – Reg. No. 1971/001759/07

 
This is a shocking revelation considering the Constitutional Court found these upgrades to be fraught with corruption and unlawful enrichment, and once again proves that the more connected and corruptible you are, the more valuable to the ANC government you become, and the more illegitimate money you can make.
The DA will be referring this matter to the Chief Procurement Officer at the National Treasury to immediately intervene in this matter, and to conduct an assessment as to whether any of the companies involved has breached the Supply Change Management (SCM) policy and/or the National Treasury Regulations. We are adamant that any company or individual who unduly benefitted from carrying out work at Nkandla must be blacklisted and held accountable for their actions.
We also note yesterday’s suspicious U-turn by Minister Nhleko, whereby he cancelled a press briefing scheduled for today in which he planned to “set the record straight” on further upgrades to President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla homestead. No reasons were given for the cancellation. I will therefore be submitting written questions to the Minister, seeking an explanation for the proposed new upgrades at Nkandla.
I wish to once again make it clear that the DA rejects any new or further upgrades to the President’s Nkandla home, regardless of how they are described or categorised by national government. We maintain that not another cent of taxpayers’ money must be spent at Nkandla for the benefit of one man.
Corruption is an evil that enriches the elite at the expense of the poor and the jobless. The DA will not stop until all those who are involved in corruption and any abuse of public funds are held to the highest account.