Thabiso Goba29 June 2024 | 7:55

City of Tshwane officials implicated in R246m wasteful, irregular expenditure to face the music

Much of the irregular expenditure has been carried over from previous years, in particular the botched 2014 Nicki Minaj concert and the irregular 2019 Rooiwal plant tender.

City of Tshwane officials implicated in R246m wasteful, irregular expenditure to face the music

Jacaranda trees in the City of Tshwane. Picture: South African Tourism/Flickr

JOHANNESBURG - The City of Tshwane will be going after its own employees to recover some of the R246 million it has incurred in irregular and wasteful expenditure.

This is contained in a municipal public accounts committee (MPAC) report recently tabled before the Tshwane council.

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Much of the irregular expenditure has been carried over from previous years, in particular, the botched 2014 Nicki Minaj concert and the irregular 2019 Rooiwal plant tender.

Adriana Randall, a Democratic Alliance (DA) councillor who sits on MPAC said the council voted for the city to recover the money instead of writing it off.

She said city officials who have been found to be negligent or corrupt in the awarding of these contracts will pay the price.

"Those officials will now be charged and we will see how assets can be seized, whether it's pension money, houses, property, we will see how much we can recover and obviously the suppliers involved will then be blacklisted on the National Treasury supplier database."

In 2014, the Tshwane metro lost about R65 million on the Minaj concert which never happened.

Randall said until the city officially writes off the contract, that irregular expenditure will remain on the books.

She said another wasteful expenditure was the R147 million the city paid to Edwin Sodi’s Blackhead Consulting in 2019 for upgrades to the Rooiwal Wastewater Treatment Plant.

"Initially, opposition parties were pushing us to stay with the recommendation for a write-off and we felt as the coalition party in MPAC that you cannot just write off R147 million for the Rooiwal plant."