Dear KwaDukuza Councillors,

When you take your seats in our plush new council chamber, you will be asked to subscribe to a Good Governance Commitment, which was adopted by Council earlier this year.

The third point reads: Commit to transparency by ensuring that our processes are open, our decisions are clear and that we communicate honestly with our communities.

All eyes will be on you to see if you make a better job of it than your predecessor Council. Last year, it met “in committee” – behind closed doors – on no less than 38 occasions.

Cumulatively, nearly three full days were spent debating items kept from the public.

Decisions were taken, but the vast majority were not conveyed to the public.

Culprits were named but no details given of their punishment.

Cases were closed, shelved, shuffled quietly off into oblivion or ended up as an obscure line in a Council pack. Money, lots of it, was paid to investigative agencies without the fruit of their labour being revealed.

A municipal manager was suspended, an acting temporary one appointed, then a new acting one after him.

Money was written off in nine secret meetings on financial matters, millions of rands, in unallocated deposits, debts and settlements. Court cases were won or lost and out-of-court deals clinched.

The facts were deemed secret. So were the processes and the outcomes. Even the Register of secret matters was a secret.

And as a sign of its determination to get on top of things, the last council failed at its last meeting to even agree on the Terms of Reference for a Financial Disciplinary Board to deal with the sort of high-level corruption and incompetence causing all the secret meetings in the first place.

The result of all this secrecy is that we had one of the best-informed councils on all the dark issues in Council and one of the worst informed publics.

The first casualty, naturally, has been trust between the elected governors and the governed.
So, what was so secret that we, the public, had to be barred?

Nine of the secret meetings involved the suspension of the former municipal manager and four other officials in the wake of a Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) Section 106 (1) (b) probe into alleged malfeasance, maladministration, and incompetence.

Another three involved technical issues about how and by whom the findings should be reviewed. Two were about settlements with banks.

The question was whether the municipal manager and senior staff were grossly negligent in failing to heed a Council instruction that they should tighten security of the municipal central account after an abortive hacking attempt late last year?

Did this alleged negligence facilitate the R37.6-million hacking heist in January of this year of which R33-million was recovered and the affected banks have offered R3-million in settlement on the balance? The investigators certainly think so.

Other issues involve the alleged misuse of Mayoral vehicles over the 2024/25 holiday season. The supplier of the vehicles allegedly charged up to six times above industry monthly rates.

The Cogta report recommends the money be recovered from the parties but attempts by Docrra to find out if this had been done were met by silence. It is, you see, a secret.

There were also findings about broken contracts and huge losses to the Council, a collapse of internal Supply Chain Management, contract management and basic book-keeping regarding the Flood Disaster Relief Fund of R1.2-billion.

Dozens of recommendations were made by the inquiry to fix things and deal with culprits. Have they been implemented? Who knows.

Then there was a Special Investigations Unit report into the role high-level officials played in a 2018 tender and another report by Province into a massive land deal. Both have made adverse findings and recommended follow-ups.

What has happened? Secret.

The only two issues which have been publicised were the exoneration of two councillors by the Council’s own Ethics Committee: one was charged with interfering in a tender and the other for allowing illegal dwellings on public land.

Now, it is perfectly valid to argue that one cannot say too much about active investigations or prosecutions for fear of prejudicing the outcome. It is also fair to argue one should avoid pre-judging an issue.

But the KwaDukuza Council’s silence on multiple issues goes far beyond those considerations. It is an overly restrictive interpretation of the law, needlessly cautious and contrary to the Council’s own governance charter.

So, new Councillors, we congratulate you on your election and wish you well in the great task ahead of serving our beautiful region.

You arrive at a time of unprecedented collaboration and trust between the municipality and civil society and a national consensus that the system of local government must be overhauled.

But here is your major challenge: shine the light on those dark corners. Rise to the challenge set by your own Governance Commitment.