In the letter, the Mayor of Beaufort West, Truman Prince, requests that an ANC-aligned company be given preference in a tender in exchange for donations into the ANC’s election kitty.
He requests that his office be allowed the ability to manage to tender process for the construction of a Skills Development and Trade Test Centre in Beaufort West to ensure that an ANC sympathetic company is selected.
The Mayor in his letter expressly states that, “We are an ANC-led municipality, we are therefore in need of financial injection for our 2016 Local Government Election campaign and therefore will also want to see construction companies sympathetic and having a relationship with the ANC to benefit, in order for these companies to inject funds in our election campaign process.”
This is in violation of section 3 of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act 12 of 2004.
The DA will therefore lay criminal charges on Thursday, 28 January 2016 to have this matter investigated. This investigation will hopefully also ascertain whether the Beaufort West municipality has been subject to other instances of corruption like this during the tenure of Mayor Truman Prince.
It is clear that in the face of growing opposition support and clear prospects of loss of votes for the ANC in this year’s election, the ANC will do anything to govern at all costs, including breaking the law.
If the ANC is truly committed to rooting out corruption as it claims it is, it will remove Truman Prince as Mayor of Beaufort West pending the outcome of a full investigation.
Tender corruption most directly affects local residents as it precludes honest and hard-working contractors from obtaining tenders in favour of companies who are politically connected.
It also kills jobs, because instead of growing the local construction industry it instead ensures the enrichment of a select few.
In contrast to the ANC’s continuing policy of cadre deployment and of growing instances of corruption within the ruling party, DA-run governments have a growing history of clean, good governance. This is one of the reasons that we are set to grow our share of the vote in municipalities across South Africa this year.
This instance of election-linked corruption by the ANC is the clearest sign yet that the DA’s blue wave is sweeping across the country and the ANC has nothing to fall back on, but corruption.
