Treasury's notice a wake-up call
Evidently clear from its latest letter to the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality, the National Treasury has had it with the ineptitude of the metro. Last week Treasury’s deputy director-general of inter-government relations, Malijeng Ngqaleni wrote to the city effectively demanding that it pays pack about R3bn in grants given over the years for the IPTS. This is because the metro has thus far failed to take action, as recommended by the Deloite forensic report, against looters of the system.
Ngqaleni said the municipality had clearly ignored supply chain management processes when it hired companies for the IPTS.
“A majority of IPTS appointments were made through creative forms of irregular deviation processes that circumvented the supply chain management processes,” she wrote.
Making matters worse is that the municipality had failed to respond adequately to her earlier letter sent on June 13, which gave the city an ultimatum to act on the forensic report.
It is highly unlikely that the municipality will come up with the money.
The next step for Treasury would then be to withhold the annual grants it gives to the city for infrastructure to recoup the money.
This will spell disaster for the city, especially those who live in underdeveloped areas of the metro where the building of roads, installation of bulk services for example, are urgent necessities.
Curiously, this would also effectively make it impossible for mayor Mongameli Bobani to fulfil his patronage promise to give SMMEs R500m worth of work in the near future.
Treasury’s letter indeed exposes the spectacular failures of the administration, under successive political leadership tenures, to properly hold officials accountable for the biggest corruption scandal in the city in recent years.
It must also serve as a wake-up call for the provincial government to make the necessary interventions as provided for by our constitution to save the people of this city from further disastrous consequences of our city’s political madness.