Disciplinary probe into Nkandla officials flops
THE DEPARTMENT of Public Works has called off its internal disciplinary hearings to probe officials implicated in the awarding of contracts for the controversial upgrades to Nkandla.
And Lawson Naidoo, the executive director of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, told The Star’s sister paper, The Mercury, yesterday that this meant, ultimately, that no one would be held accountable for the Nkandla scandal.
“Despite all that we’ve been through,” Naidoo said. “There’s been continuous blame-shifting in the whole Nkandla saga from the beginning, from the president downwards.”
Naidoo said it was clear that the costs of the upgrades were “hugely inflated”.
“And it’s quite clear there was significant wrongdoing in the process,” he said.
Shortly after the first Nkandla hearing finally got off the ground, it was unceremoniously postponed until further notice.
Now, some two months later, it has emerged that the hearings were off altogether.
The Public Service Association’s KwaZulu-Natal manager, Claude Naicker, said the hearings had been “dispensed with”.
He said the department had “settled” all 10 of its cases against the Public Works officials.
Naicker could not divulge the terms of the settlement agreements due to confidentiality clauses contained therein, but said all the officials were “back at work, continuing with their duties”.
The hearings have been delayed on several occasions over the past three years.
They got under way in 2014 but had to be put on hold soon after, for Media24, Times Media Group and the Mail & Guardian to apply for media access.
The matter ended up in the high court in Pietermaritzburg and last year Judge Piet Koen eventually ruled in favour of the media.
After that, the hearings were repeatedly postponed until July, when that of Jayshree Pardesi, the former assistant director at the department in KZN, got under way.
Pardesi, who had been on the regional bid adjudication committee (RBAC) that appointed contractor Money Mine 310 CC to carry out work on President Jacob Zuma’s northern KZN home, was charged with misconduct for awarding the contract through a “negotiated procurement strategy”.
This meant Money Mine was the only company approached to do the work and – according to the department – that the contract was not awarded following the normal open and fair tender process.
Over the course of two days, evidence emerged that Pardesi should not even have been on the committee that signed off on the tender and that her boss asked her to stand in for him at the last minute.
It also emerged that there were normally several days between the sittings of the bid evaluation committee – which evaluates tenders and makes recommendations – and the RBAC – which approves or rejects those recommendations.
But in the case of the Money Mine contract, the entire process appeared to have taken just a few hours.
For the first time, the public was gaining a glimpse into how the events around the upgrades unfolded – but then the hearing was adjourned to a date set in late August.
But it did not go ahead that day and the department has remained mum on the subject since then. Spokesperson Thamsanqa Mchunu has ignored a number of e-mails sent to him querying the status of the hearings, and did not respond to another e-mail sent yesterday.
A source with knowledge of the matter said yesterday that there had been high level of “interference” during the hearings.
The DA’s spokesperson for public works, Malcolm Figg, said the party was going to write to the minister and ask him to explain what had happened as well as the lack of transparency.