North West councillors fight over unpaid pensions

Moses Kotane councillors are crying foul after they discovered their pensions have not been paid over to the relevant fund by the North West municipality for 17 months.

Now, councillors are demanding an explanation from the municipality’s management over the deducted funds.

While a report by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority only mentioned councillors as affected, the plight of hundreds of employees of the municipality remains unknown.

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Councillors up in arms for their pensions

Moses Kotane has 68 councillors comprising 46 seats for the ANC followed by the EFF (13) and DA and Tsogang Civic Movement with two seats each, and a single seat each for the Forum for Service Delivery, Independents for Communities, African Independent Congress, African Christian Democratic Party and United Christian Democratic Party.

The issue emerged as members prepared to make claims for their two-pot retirement funds from the beginning of this month.

Moses Kotane appeared among list of municipalities that had not been paying over the pension deductions.

Now many are pointing fingers at senior officials, including municipal manager and accounting officer Mokopane Letsoalo and chief financial officer Mzwandile Mkhize.

Mkhize was hired by the municipality amid concerns he shouldn’t have been employed due to fraud and corruption charges he faced with two other officials emanating from the VBS Mutual Bank saga at West Rand municipality in Gauteng, before he joined Moses Kotane.

Mkhize was appointed on 30 November last year and he assumed duty on 3 January this year.

Later, the ANC instructed for the appointment to be reversed, but ANC councillors declined to remove Mkhize.

The ANC threatened to take disciplinary action against its councillors but that did not happen.

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Municipality defended CFO earlier in year

Early this year, Letsoalo defended Mkhize’s appointment, saying there was no wrongdoing and proper procedures were followed in engaging the official, including being vetted.

A municipal statement said Mkhize was also hired earlier in another capacity and “the municipality learned of the VBS allegations against Mkhize in 2021 while he was working at the municipality but his case was still going through the court and, therefore, Mkhize had not yet been found guilty”.

A test case is yet to be initiated in court to challenge entities and companies that withheld employees’ pension fund deductions without their knowledge.

The unpaid funds are believed to run into trillions of rands as the majority of workers had never accessed their funds, even as they approached retirement age.

Attempts to get comment from speaker Gugu Mtshali and Letsoalo were unsuccessful at the time of going to press.

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