DA calls for urgency in water theft probe
The Democratic Alliance has welcomed an announcement by Makana Municipality regarding an investigation into alleged deliberate water cuts that had Grahamstown residents in a panic just before this year’s National Arts Festival, but they accused the Council of dragging its feet in dealing with the matter.
DA Caucus leader Mlindi Nhanha said the DA noted and welcomed an announcement by Makana Municipality that the official whose alleged negligence nearly cost the city rights to host the festival and loss of such a much needed revenue and jobs for the people has finally been brought before a disciplinary committee.
In a statement released on Tuesday 29 November, Nhanha said according to CEO Tony Lankester, the festival contributes close to R60 million to the GDP of Grahamstown.
“It’s now five months since the infamous water outage in June 2016 just few days before the start of the National Arts Festival. Large parts of Grahamstown woke up to terrible news of no water supply yet again. Despite promises from the authorities, no action was ever taken against the employee concerned,” he said.
Nhanha says the DA in Makana Municipality is appalled at an apparent lack of political will and the feet dragging on the part of Council leadership in dealing with this matter.
“The culprit and his colleagues have no reason to take their jobs seriously in future because they know there will be no consequences, despite the gravity of their conduct. It is about time that the ANC walks the talk if we are to turn the fortunes of this municipality around.”
The DA has called on Executive Mayor Nomhle Gaga to ensure a speedy conclusion to the matter and to investigate why it took so long before anybody was held accountable. Nhanha has also encouraged the mayor to take the DA into her confidence as to which steps will be taken to avoid such preventable outages from occurring in fu- ture. He also suggested that a report on the disciplinary action and investigation be made public.
“(The) reality of losing the National Arts festival, SciFest, Highway Africa and other big events and the income that comes with them, looms very large if the municipality can’t act decisively,” he said.
In response to the DA’s comments about the matter, municipal spokesperson Yoliswa Ramokolo said the municipality took the matter very seriously, adding that, thorough investigations had to be conducted in order to address the case: “We know the financial impact and the importance of such events within our community and we wouldn’t want to jeopardise that in any way. That is why we went all out to make sure that we delivered water to all our areas as much as we could,” she said.
Ramokolo said the matter was unfortunately sub judice and therefore they could not comment on it but she said something was being done about it.
“As the DA councillor con- curs that it was part of the report of the Fame portfolio committee, that very clearly shows that the municipality is doing all it can to bring the culprit/s to book.”
Ramokolo disputed allegations that the Council was dragging its feet as suggested by the DA.
“Thorough investigations and consultations need to be done before taking any action and that is what is being done,” she insisted.
She explained that steps were taken to ensure that such incidents did not happen again.
Ramokolo also said the James Kleynhans pump station was in the process of being upgraded, adding that both Makana and Amatola Water were keeping a close eye on the situation to ensure that it was not repeated.
“The James Kleynhans pump station is in the process of being upgraded. The service provider is already on site. Also Amatola and Makana staff are doing operations and maintenance on regular basis to guard against such instances,” she said.