GRASKOP – With flies starting to invade the town due to the condition at the local rubbish dump, a desperate councillor, Mr Johan Ligthelm, addressed a letter to the acting municipal manager of Thaba Chweu, Mr Surprise Maebela. He cited the flies and four other serious service delivery problems as matters of grave concern.
“In the expenditure list for 2012/13, approximately R131 000 per month was spent on the cleaning of graveyards. But no cleaning has been done at the Sabie and Graskop graveyards in years,” according to Ligthelm.
Ms Babsie McNelly from the Graskop Tourism and Business Chamber said that the previous refuse management contractor had apparently not been paid and therefore no work had been done at the town’s rubbish dump for several weeks. According to reports, a new contractor had been appointed last week on a month to month basis, but TCM had not confirmed this at the time of going to print. It had also not responded to questions regarding the maintenance of graveyards, the plan for fixing of potholes, and the reason for many of the storm water drains along Richardson Street left open for weeks with no apparent work being done on it.
Ligthelm remarked that, “A well-known television personality recently remarked that there are more potholes in one street in Graskop and Sabie, than there are in the whole of Cape Town! Does Mr Kemmy Masego, unit manager, do his job?” He asked Maebela why he couldn’t take a vehicle and “go and check for yourself and rectify the problem?”.
Ligthelm, a DA councillor, reported last month that financial irregularities in TCM included irregular expenditure for the 2012/13 financial year amounting to R57,57 million. “We have, however, achieved success this week with the announcement that a full forensic audit will be conducted,” he told Lowvelder on Monday.
The civil rights group, AfriForum, which recently started a branch in town, said that it was also investigating the misappropriation of funds. According to it, the municipality had spent more than R700 000 on cemetery maintenance between August 2012 and July 2013, with no sign of this on site.
