BCM cadres not fit for office

MILES’S cartoon [DD, February 6] depicting wasteful expenditure by the BCM council correctly identifies the squandering but incorrectly identifies the culprit.

As your report in the Saturday Dispatch [February 4] correctly states, it was the executive mayor who authorised both the expenditure of some R200 000 for deputy mayor Zoliswa Matana and ANC councillor Sindiswa Gomba to travel on a tourism roadshow to India last week, as well as R25 000 for four other ANC councillors to attend a fake women’s stakeholder relations workshop in Johannesburg, which just happened to coincide with the ANC’s annual January 8 jamboree.

Neither of these amounts has been brought before the council or before its finance committee. Indeed the finance committee’s oversight of the municipal finances since last year’s local government elections in August has been somewhat underwhelming.

It has met twice – in October when its only agenda item was to recommend the write-off of several million rands of obsolete stock and again in January to consider the municipal budget finances to end-November, a meeting that was aborted due to the lack of officials attending whose presence was necessary to respond to the many questions arising from the municipal financial performance.

While the quarterly municipal accounts to end-October and end-December have both been tabled in council, neither has been submitted to the finance committee for proper scrutiny as they should have.

It is this scorn by the mayor and his advisers for proper processes, which is tantamount to contempt of due process, and the role of the finance committee which demonstrates again why he and his cabal of ANC cadres are not fit to hold office in Buffalo City. — Bill Gould, DA PR councillor