Anger at City over retraction of flood report

ETHEKWINI Municipality this week retracted an engineering report on the eMdloti floods, prompting residents to have it independently verified and calling on the municipality for the reasons for the retraction.

Environmental justice campaigner Nicole Barlow, who is acting for the residents, said they didn’t accept the retraction, which came after the City released a copy, and “we shall keep distributing this report” until an independent commission of inquiry was set up.

Kevin Minter-Brown, a resident who has been speaking on behalf of the community, confirmed that Barlow was acting for them.

He said residents had raised money to pay legal fees and that he would instruct the municipality to present its exact reasons for the withdrawal of the report by Monday afternoon.

“If they fail to respond, or the reasons aren’t feasible or legitimate, then we can draw the conclusion that it was the result of pressure from the developer, and that we are safe to charge the city manager.”

The City referred the Independent on Saturday to a statement released earlier in the week in which City spokesman Msawakhe Mayisela apologised for releasing the report “prematurely, before exhausting internal processes related to reports of this nature”.

“We appreciate the interest members of the media have in this report. However, we are humbly appealing for it to not be disseminated, as it is not yet an official report.”

Mayisela said the City “would like to state categorically that there was nothing that was being hidden, and there was nothing sinister about retracting the report”.