Tshwane Mayor expecting a political backlash after Rooiwal tender suspensions

Five senior officials were placed on precautionary suspension with full pay last week.

Brink says his administration is continuing with clamping down on irregular expenditure in especially supply chain management. 

"When you fix wrongdoing in a system, there are always people who will try and rally politicians to their cause. And that we must also be ready for. We do the right thing and we face the consequences and if that includes a political backlash, that's fine. WE are ready for that."

This follows after a year-long internal disciplinary process found them guilty on one of the four charges they faced.

 The charges include:

- Allowing Blackhead Consulting to progress to the next stage of the evaluation without being registered with the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) and without having the required CIDB 9CE or 9ME.

- Consensus-based decision making instead of evaluating independently as members of Bid Evaluation Committee (BEC).

- Conclusion of Blackhead Consulting services to render professional services in the circumstances where the city had already appointed a company to render professional services. Consequently, the city incurred costs of R10 999 786.96

- Evaluating the winning bidder on 1,4m belt presses width when the specification required 2m width.

Mayor Brink says while his administration is readying for the political fall-out, it is important to convey to the people of Hammanskraal that there is accountability for the tender.

"One thing that we have been clear about, is that there must be accountability on the Rooiwal issues. Yes, we are taking hands with national government to actually fix the problem but there was an irregular tender, there was a forensic investigation, the municipal council did consider that forensic investigation and the City Manger was charged with implementing its findings. That he is doing and its is just important that folks understand that there are consequences for bad behaviour."

"This is a city with 10 billion Rand of irregular expenditure in the past decade. We have uncovered many irregularities, there has been justified criticism on us to 'say clean up and clean out', and so when we have a City Manager that does exactly that, our job is to support him, provided that it makes sense and to me it makes complete sense."

He adds that the City must act against irregularities.

"It might be a foreign thing to us as a city but it must happen if we are going to build a city that actually works for all those people.

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