Draining Tshwane's Swamp

Mayor Solly Msimanga wants to focus on service delivery.

- Susan Puren

SINCE AUGUST LAST YEAR THE CITY of Tshwane’s metro municipality and its DA mayor, Solly Msi-manga, have decorated many pages in Noseweek, which has exposed a litany of fraud and corruption left behind by the previous regime and its ever-so greedy cohorts.

Shortly after being sworn in, Msimanga was confronted with the so called shoe polish scandal. Tens of thousands of small tins of Kiwi shoe polish had been ordered over the years at three times the retail price and nobody was able to say why and for whom. Also stocked up in excess in the city’s warehouses were household cleaning products like Surf and Handy Andy – purchased by the thousand in the smallest packaging available but sold to the municipality at a 100% mark-up on the wholesale price. The most shocking was the energy saving globes that Tshwane purchased at R300 each, while Makro was selling the same items for R79 each.

The household cleaning stuff was meant for elderly or indigent households needing assistance, Msimanga tells Noseweek, as he is interviewed in his office in the municipal building in Centurion. “But it does not justify the money spent, which could have been used in a more beneficial way.”

In November last year Noseweek named several vendors and officials in the city’s supply chain who were allegedly working together to defraud the municipality on a daily basis. Family members and friends of officials were supplying sundry goods ranging from nails to mini sub-stations, seemingly from the same address – without a proper office or workshop and without being registered for VAT.