What’s DA’s motive for keeping IPTS?
IN 2014 then finance minister Nhlanhla Nene, after revelations by The Herald (“Where’s the IPTS money?”, September 5 2014), announced an investigation was to be conducted into the IPTS.
After the shocking revelations by Crispian Olver in his book,
How to Steal a City, he demonstrates that the investigation into the IPTS, which was carried out by lauded auditing firm Deloitte, was compromised because of conflicts of interest on the part of Deloitte.
The Deloitte investigation could not enter certain areas where said conflicts were present.
The report is therefore selective and cannot be trusted as there will by default be major omissions.
Such omissions may be protecting high level perpetrators while scapegoats at lower levels are identified.
Olver gives plenty of starters on the omissions that may be present.
After the report was made available to the ANC it could not decide how to handle it and it was, true to form, not publicly released.
Strangely, when the DA came into power it also could not decide how to handle it, other than that it continued to keep it under wraps.
All we are told is that it is being used for behind the scenes investigations, and some people are likely to be disciplined and perhaps dismissed.
The IPTS was first, second and last a cash cow for the benefit of those who, from the top down, managed it under the guise of it being needed to improve public transport, with the well-worn buzz phase of an “affordable, efficient, etc service”, that was not and cannot be proven
The DA had every opportunity to scrap the system or demand its own investigation, as it was clearly an ANC and not a DA failed project.
It could have pre-empted the Olver findings instead of now implicating itself therein.
Instead the DA picked up on it and the first thing it did was knock on Treasury’s door for a roll-over of more money, which, as it transpired, it did not, like the ANC before it, have a plan for and bungled the spending thereof.
It has for more than a year now pushed and shoved against massive resistance, missing deadline after deadline to get the system running.
Why should the DA be so hell-bent on continuing to request more money, when all it is doing is tapping into the 10-year-old corrupt project?
It begs the question: has the DA also set itself up to be part of the beneficiary chain?
Can the DA therefore, like multiple other organisations and individuals appointed to high places with question marks over their heads, be trusted?
Pierre Joubert, Port Elizabeth