Disciplinary board in eThekwini comes under fire for failing to deal with errant civil servants
|Published
An aerial view of the City Hall building in the CBD. The City Hall building in Durban. The eThekwini Municipality has been accused of taking too long to deal with disciplinary matters against employees. File Picture: eThekwini Municipality Facebook page.
Durban - The financial misconduct disciplinary board in eThekwini Municipality has come under fire for failing to deal swiftly with employees involved in wrongdoing that is costing the municipality millions of rand in fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
EFF councillor Thabane Miya said some cases dragged on for years until the matters prescribed. The law states that prescription applies to labour disputes. Matters prescribe after a period of three years.
But ANC councillor Nkosenhle Madlala said while there were challenges experienced under the old board, a new board was in place.
The effectiveness of the board came under scrutiny as councillors discussed writing off about R763 million in fruitless and wasteful expenditure that had been incurred by the City council. The Municipal Public Accounts Committee (Mpac) detailed the expenditure during a council meeting last week.
Mpac recommended writing off the funds on account that the City had received value for money regarding the goods and services procured, despite procurement processes not being followed. But councillors in the opposition benches called for the City to discipline those that caused it to suffer the impairment of fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
Miya said it seemed that the municipality had no appetite to discipline errant staff, and the board, which was at one point dysfunctional, was not performing its task.
He demanded that action be taken against all those who failed to comply with the procurement process, resulting in such cases.
“I happened to be in exco at a time and I noticed that there was no willingness to discipline people, even in the disciplinary board, the cases there dragged for more than three years so that the prescription (happens), people are suspended indefinitely and we cannot tolerate this as the EFF,” Miya said.
“We need to recoup the money (lost in that manner) and there has to be a consequence management. You can’t suspend people indefinitely,” he said, adding that there must be time-lines to deal with those accused of wrongdoing.
ActionSA councillor Alan Beesley said the party believed that the board was failing in its duties.
“The result is that consequence management is not happening, which has led to incompetent and corrupt officials continuing to be employed by the City.
“They can continue to operate with impunity in the knowledge that consequence management is not taking place. This ultimately impacts on service delivery, which is at an all-time low.
“ActionSA has serious concerns whether the ANC-led municipality has the political will to implement proper consequence management,” he said.
Madlala said the councillors were correct in the assessment of the performance of the previous board, but said the new board that was in place had worked effectively to clear a case backlog dating back to 2017.
“It’s because of the work of this board that we can now see there are cases whose prescription has lapsed and we cannot do anything about them,” Madlala said.
Madlala said part of the challenge, as explained by the previous board, was that they could not move on some cases as there were criminal investigations pending by law-enforcement agencies.