The ANC fiddled with KDM budgets to pay for Christmas parties, according to opposition parties.
MF councillor Bikram Sing stated that three festivals were held during the festive season, without approval from council.
A music forum was held at the KwaDukuza town hall on December 12, followed by a music festival at the KwaDukuza country club grounds on December 19 and another at Blythedale Beach from December 26 to 27.
“The music forum on the 12th took place before the council meeting on the 18th, which means money was spent without council’s knowledge,” said Sing.
“When the topic was finally brought to council’s attention, it was obvious that no proposals or budgets had been discussed and the R1,3 million was simply taken without question or permission.”
During the 2014/2015 budget process no allocation was made towards these events. The music festival had been removed from the communications department vote.
According to Council documents, the R1.3 million was made up of surpluses from the Moral Regeneration Programme, State of the Municipality Address, Memorial Event for the Victims of Violence, Events, KDM Video project, Mayoral Awards and Ward Committee Members accounts.
“The ANC were caucusing for about two hours, while all the other councillors had to wait outside and when we finally reconvened, ANC councillor S. Gumede insisted that the matter be no further discussed,” said ACDP councillor Nel Sewraj.
A vote was held to decide whether the matter should be ignored or postponed to be discussed at a later stage.
Only five councillors were against the matter being postponed, three IFP, one MF and one ACDP.
“We did not want a postponement, we wanted to discuss it immediately,” said councillor Sewraj.
Opposition councillors were furious that the DA was the only opposition party to vote for the matter to be postponed.
DA Councillor Malcolm Hubner told the Courier they voted for the postponement as the ANC was not willing to discuss the matter.
“Therefore this seemed like the only option to get some sort of explanation, albeit it was not a good solution. When one of the councillors asked if the events were going to continue, the municipal manager said it would, which meant that this was a case of unauthorised expenditure. There are a number of issues that have to be resolved: the funding for these festive season parties increase drastically every year. The funding for these events was moved from one budget to the next in order to get this large sum and none of this was authorised and then the events still continued,” said Hubner.
To make things worse, about R720 000 was already paid to service providers for the event on the 12th before the topic was even mentioned to council and again without authorisation.
“We always have these events at the end of the year and although the item did not come up timeously, which will be addressed at the next meeting, we were aware of it,” said KDM speaker, Thulani Khuluse.
The matter is to be discussed at the first council meeting this month.
