Mayco Member for Urban Waste Management, Grant Twigg, is the man to blame for the mountains of vullis piling up in townships across Cape Town.
A forensic investigation into the collapse of waste collection services has outed Twigg, along with a City of Cape Town dik ding as those responsible.
The shocking report, which was leaked to the Daily Voice, reveals that the formation of a new “in-house” model was undertaken with no delegated authority by Twigg and his executive director (ED) Luzuko Mdunyelwa.
According to a source, the report is being kept under wraps but a resolution was taken for the matter to be further investigated.
The source says: “It’s all being kept very hush but the report shows that the ED and Twigg did their own thing.
“They wanted to do it in-house and then it flopped, leaving many areas unserviced. We were told over 300 informal settlements were affected as the cleaning services just collapsed.”
According to the internal report issued to councillors at the last council meeting in December, the new refuse collection model has resulted in High Court action against the municipality and a staggering budget of R514 million in a cost comparison.
According to the report, the Urban Waste Management Department decided to stop using external service providers as of 1 July 2023. It states that City Manager, Lungelo Mbandazayo, became aware of the pilot project and after it was found that Mdunyelwa had changed the model without proper due diligence, he instructed that the external service providers be called back.
It was also found that the change in the model was not in line with the Local Government Financial Management Act.
At the time, the municipality had 21 active tenders for cleansing and 15 tenders active for waste collection.
The investigation found that the City had received 18 902 complaints of which 38 percent were from areas which were being serviced by external providers.
The majority of these were related to illegal dumping sites, while two referred to overflowing containers in Valhalla Park and Philippi.
At the end of May last year, one of the external service providers lodged an application at the Western Cape High Court.
The report reveals that a memo circulated among staff during the same month indicated that the directorate would be implementing a new project called “Siyazenzela Cleaning Programme”.
It reads: “This memo was issued four days before the ED received the project plan, which indicates that he had made up his mind to proceed with the project without considering all possible advice,” the report reads, as it indicates that tenders were terminated without authority.
During the same time Twigg, accompanied by Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, joined City waste removal staff to thank them for their efforts to sustain basic services to the Kosovo informal settlement and broader Philippi East amid security threats and extortion attempts.
In a budget breakdown, it was found that the project outlay had nearly doubled from R314m to R514m.
The report concludes: “The investigation indicates that the ED and the Mayco member were not only involved, but responsible for the changing the service delivery model which resulted in the collapse of the service in informal settlements.”
Twigg said he was unable to comment on any of the findings in the report and referred the Daily Voice to the City Manager.
City spokesperson, Priya Reddy, says: “As this investigation is ongoing it would be inappropriate to comment at this time.”