Land Budget Plundered

Farmland given valuation of developed, serviced land

- Susan Puren

THE OWNER OFFERED HIS FARM TO Tshwane for R30 million but the metro was already conniv-ing to rather pay R90m to a po-litically connected middleman for the same property.

In its August issue Noseweek reported that two men had walked away with R126m of taxpayers’ money by acting as intermediary owners, selling farmland at highly inflated prices to the Tshwane Metro in 2016. They owned the properties for only a few minutes on paper before selling them on, making profits of R94m and R32m respectively with the back-to-back transactions.

The response received from Stevens Mokgalapa, the Executive Mayor of the DA-run Tshwane Metro was that he had “noted” the contents of the Noseweek story. But so far no action has been taken against the middlemen-sellers of the land or the senior employees who initiated, negotiated and signed off on the questionable deals.

One of them was Amolemo Mothoagae, who was the head of Tshwane’s Housing and Human Settlement Department at the time of the transactions. She has since left Tshwane to become the executive director of Johannesburg’s Development Planning department. Mothoagae’s name came up once again in the past month when Noseweek found yet another property transaction where an intermediary had made millions of rands.

In December 2015 Mothoagae submitted a report to the Tshwane Mayoral Committee, chaired by the ANC’s Kgosientso Sputla Ramokgopa, motivating for approval for the acquisition of the remaining extent of the farm Roodepoort 504. The farm is located on the outskirts of Tshwane Metro near Bronkhorstspruit, some 50km east of Pretoria’s CBD.