Voting official halts polls

Anger as IEC staff member caught casting ballot twice

AN ALLEGED irregularity by an IEC official at a voting station in Khayelitsha’s Ward 93 caused anger among political parties, which called for her removal after she cast her vote without producing her ID.

ANC Dullah Omar region spokesperson Khaya Yozi said: “IEC staff must either vote on special vote or if they miss that they must vote first thing in the morning before they start working. If they miss that too, before they close the voting they must vote. They must also have their identification documents.”

Party agents charged that the IEC official voted twice, first without an ID and later again, with one. The official was caught by an EFF member, who then alerted IEC officials.

Voting was stopped for 90 minutes yesterday as a team from the IEC arrived at the voting in Green Point, Khayelitsha, to resolve the situation.

Yozi demanded that the official be disciplined and removed from the voting station.These elections come after the former ward councillor was forced to resign from her position.

Ward 93 councillor Ntombebala Mquqwana was asked by ANC provincial secretary Faiez Jacobs to resign a year after she took up her seat in the council over her irregular selection as a candidate.

Yesterday the EFF’s Fola Mithani said they would not proceed with the elections until the official was reprimanded.

“The IEC and these criminals are friends. There was a discrepancy where a member of staff of the IEC assisted herself to vote without an ID. That is fraudulent and cannot be tolerated. As different political organisations we feel like the process is not fair,” said Mithani.

DA members demanded that the elections be conducted afresh, however after IEC officials were called in members agreed that the votes of the official be singled out.

This comes at a time when various ANC branches in the province are struggling to convene branch general meetings (BGMs).

The party’s national executive committee announced that about 66.3% of BGMs had been convened in the Western Cape. The province will have 182 out of the conference’s total of 5000 branch delegates – the smallest delegation among the nine provinces.

On Tuesday, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe announced that the party’s recent special national executive committee had agreed to grant branches a grace period to the end of this weekend. GLOBAL consultancy firm McKinsey stood ready to repay the money it earned from a flawed Eskom deal but did not know where to direct the R1 billion refund, senior partner Dave Fine yesterday told the parliamentary inquiry into allegations of state capture at the power utility.

“McKinsey does not want tainted money. So if the court decides that payment was valid, McKinsey will still give that money back to South Africa,” Fine said.

“The amount we are talking about is the billion rand that McKinsey was paid by Eskom.”

He hastened to point out that this decision did not imply guilt on the part of the company, but was based on the fact that it has emerged that Eskom entered into the deal without proper approval from the National Treasury.

“We are not paying the money because we did something wrong. I just want to be explicit about that. We went into the relationship with Eskom in good faith, and they told us they had the Treasury approvals for the at-risk arrangement. The fact that they did not is why we want to give back the money,” Fine said.

“As I state now, I think the contract is valid because we did real work.”

He conceded that McKinsey allocated staff to work on the deal struck with Eskom before a contract was in place, but said this was not done on a cynical assumption that it would secure the contract regardless of procurement rules. – ANA