Opposition parties walked out of a full council meeting of the eThekwini Municipality following a decision to withhold a controversial forensic audit report.
|||Durban - Opposition parties walked out of a full council meeting of the eThekwini Municipality on Tuesday, following a provincial government decision to withhold a controversial forensic audit report.
The audit - prepared by Manase and Associates - was commissioned about two years ago by KwaZulu-Natal MEC Nomusa Dube.
According to reports, it implicates several eThekwini municipal councillors, top national and provincial politicians, their families, and prominent business personalities in corrupt practices amounting to billions of rand.
The report summary was made public last year, but opposition parties in the province have been calling for the release of the full report.
Dube was set to brief the media at 11am on Tuesday on her decision to withhold the so-called Manase report, but this had not happened by noon.
The morning council meeting was closed. The press and public who attempted to enter the public gallery at Durban's City Hall were barred by security from doing so.
Democratic Alliance councillor Avril Coen said council members had not seen the report.
“They did not give us anything. All they wanted to do was provide us with recommendations, but we have not seen the report.”
The forensic audit was instituted after Auditor-General Terence Nombembe said in his 2009/10 report that the municipality had irregularly spent R532 million.
Democratic Alliance councillor Heinz de Boer said it had emerged at the meeting that Dube would not release the full report but deliver a progress report with recommendations.
“We are not interested in updates. We are not going to be complicit in them covering it up any more; that is the reason we walked out of there.”
“How do you accept recommendations on a report that you have not seen?” he asked.
Representatives of the DA, National Freedom Party, the Minority Front, the Congress of the People, and the African Christian Democratic Party walked out before Dube began her presentation. - Sapa