DEMANDING AN APOLOGY FROM THE EXECUTIVE MAYOR OF CAPE TOWN
The ANC is calling for the Executive Mayor, Patricia de Lille, to apologise to both the public and the African National Congress for deceiving and misleading us in relation to the City of Cape Town's finances, fiscal dumping and for under spending the city of Cape Town's budget in the 2012/2013 financial year.
Today we have been required to approve an amount of R632 million that will be used to pay for the compensation and scrapping allowance for taxi's in the city transport, roads and storm water budget. This amount of R632 million has been reported as the money that was spent in the 2012/2013 financial year, so the question would be, where is this money coming from now and why is it being approved in the 2013/2014 financial year? It has been confirmed by officials of the city that the DA has opened a separate account outside of the city to dump this money in and are now expecting the city council to sign off on their creative accounting.
The ANC has been clear in its statements about condemning this particular case of fiscal dumping which borders on criminal, and continues to declare that it is unacceptable and that the DA cannot be exempt from public scrutiny and being held to account when they are guilty of wrong doing.
What we have been arguing as the ANC is that the city did not spend the 92, 9% of its budget as the Mayor claimed at a recent press conference, but in fact, is guilty of hiding money away and lying blatantly to the press and to the public to make themselves look better as the DA.
We have been vindicated by the Provincial Gazette no 71/52 which stipulates very clearly that the city of Cape Town has only spent 85,3% of its budget in the 2012/2013 financial year. We are therefore calling the Mayor, who publically announced that the city had spent 92,9% of the budget to therefore publically retract her statement and apologise to the press, the public and the ANC for misleading them in order to make the DA led city of cape town look better than they really were.
Now that it has been established that the ANC facts and figures were correct we also call upon the speaker to apologise for his treatment of our ANC Caucus Leader Tony Ehrenreich and ANC Chief Whip Xolani Sotashe by trying to discipline them for exposing the truth and for personally stating that he had checked the figures and found no wrong doing on the DA's part.
This leads us to question why the DA has failed to spend its budget which impacts directly on service delivery, especially to the impoverished. Now that it is clear that the DA is guilty of fiscal dumping, they have been exposed as not having the ability to handle the city's finances and we are going to proceed with a deeper investigation into what appears to be widespread corrupt accounting practises of the DA in running the city.
The DA has taken great pleasure in rubbishing the ANC and claiming that the ANC couldn't understand how the administration functions but it appears that it is the Mayor, her deputy Ian Nielson and the DA who don't have the intelligence to know what's going on in the finances of the city of Cape Town or how to manage it and have knowingly misrepresented the financial status of the city.
This administration is led by a bunch of liars and hypocrites and we have exposed them and the only thing that is left for them to do is to apologise and admit that they were wrong and the ANC was right.
As we indicated and promised to the public, we are in the final stages of submitting a case both to the South African Police Services and to the Public Protector and National Treasury and are tightening up some loose ends before submitting our case.
The ANC will pursue these matters and uncover all corrupt practices by the city of Cape Town and views this as a serious scandal.
Statement issued by ANC Cape Town Chief whip Xolani Sotashe August 28 2013
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