Councillors have no place in recruitment process of EPWP – portfolio committee

THE Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP) is not a campaign tool to win voters and councillors have no business recruiting unemployed people to it.

So says the portfolio committee on public works in parliament, which paid oversight visits across the Eastern Cape recently.

The committee spent some time with authorities from King Sabata Dalindyebo (KSD) local municipality to learn more about service delivery progress and issues pertaining to the leasing and maintenance of state buildings.

KSD municipal manager Mlamli Zenzile and community services director Luvuyo Maka told the committee they had managed to absorb full time about 130 EPWP beneficiaries into their technical and community services departments.

However, the pair asked for more funding, especially to help with the training part of the programme.

“For now we are only able to give them basic training but beyond that we are not able to train them to become artisans who will be able to sustain themselves after the programme,” Maka said.

Asked how the beneficiaries were appointed, Maka said they relied on traditional authorities and ward councillors in the respective municipal wards.

But this did not go down well with the committee. Acting chairman Freddie Adams said they would meet with the department of public works to make sure that councillors were not involved in the recruitment of the beneficiaries.

“Councillors use this as a political tool. All parties do that.

“The guidelines [on the recruitment process] should change. As a committee, we will put our heads together with the department so they [councillors] can be removed.”

Adams said they wanted this done before December. This was because in 2018, parties would be campaigning for the 2019 general elections and they wanted to make sure the EPWP would not be misused.

“There is no transparency in the EPWP. Corruption is alive in the programme.”

In East London, a councillor and her husband are on trial for murder after the death of two women, allegedly at the hands of the husband because they stopped paying kickbacks for their EPWP jobs.

Since the news broke, a string of other people have come forward saying they had also been paying her.

● Zenzile told the committee that KSD was battling to free up land for development due to land claims.

This included making land available for the construction of houses for middle-class earners as at the moment only low-income earners were benefiting from lowcost housing. —