DURBAN - THE Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) under the eThekwini Municipality continues to be plagued by challenges, including corruption where municipal employees are illegally benefiting from the programme.
This is the observation made by the city’s audit committee while presenting the status of the municipality to the new executive committee yesterday.
The chairperson of the committee, Siboniso Shabalala, said they had identified shortcomings in the EPWP programme, adding that the municipality should ensure that the right people benefited from the programme.
“We have identified challenges in the programme, including that some of the people that should be benefiting from the programme cannot be identified, some of the people are benefiting from more than one programme and some of the people that are benefiting are city employees.
“The city needs to make sure that there is no double dipping on this programme and the people that are intended to benefit from the programme are the ones that are benefiting,” he said.
It was not immediately clear which second programme these individuals were benefiting from. The EPWP programme, which is meant to benefit unemployed people, has been plagued by crisis.
Recently, EPWP workers who work in the Durban Solid Waste (DSW) unit marched to the City Hall demanding that they be employed as full-time employees.
Others demanded that the municipality should either absorb them or pay them out for the period they have continued to work after their EPWP contracts had lapsed, saying they were doing the work of full-time staff members.
However, city officials warned that the municipality cannot absorb thousands of EPWP workers as that would cost them an extra R600 million a year.
The councillors said this and other matters raised by the audit committee were serious and needed more time to be properly interrogated.
DA councillor Thabani Mthethwa praised the programme, saying it was helping struggling individuals to survive. But he said that over the years it has been abused for political ends.
He said since 2016 the programme has been used to hire people on political grounds and for patronage.
“We have heard of instances where people that are staying outside the province are beneficiaries of the programme, people that are supposedly employed under the programme but never show up for work. We are therefore not surprised that there are people in that programme who cannot be accounted for,” said Mthethwa.
IFP councillor Mdu Nkosi said the revelation that municipal staff were benefiting from the programme was a disgrace that cannot be explained.
“This is theft from council resources, but worse than that the people implicated are individuals at a senior level who, by doing this, are closing spaces for the multitude of poor people who desperately need these jobs,” he said.
THE MERCURY