ADVERTISEMENT:

 
 

This photo of the site was taken in December 2019.

Another R26 million down the Lottery drain?

 

By Anton van Zyl, Tshifhiwa Mukwevho and Raymond Joseph

“The money was chowed,” my guide said as he took me on a tour of half-built structures on a construction site for a multimillion-rand old-age home at Maila village, about 30 kilometres southeast of Louis Trichardt.

That was in December 2019. Despite there being a fence around the property, it served no real purpose as the gates were wide open. A sign board in front of the buildings proclaimed the home was “Lotto Funded” but was hanging from a frame, only held up by a single rusted screw.

Taken in December 2019. At this stage the sign board was still standing, with building rubble strewn across the site.

A year later, Limpopo Mirror visited the site again, but found that no progress had been made in finishing the home. In fact, the buildings were in a worse state. The fence had been breached and some people had helped themselves to building material on what now appeared to be an abandoned construction site. Lewd graffiti is also written on some of the walls.

After the 2019 visit, Limpopo Mirror began investigating and established that altogether almost R26 million was given to a dormant and non-compliant Gauteng-based NPO by the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) to build the old-age home.

At the time, we were invited to visit the site by a concerned member of the community, who asked not to be identified as he feared for his safety. But he felt strongly that what was happening, and the waste of public funds, should be exposed. He pointed out roof trusses lying next to an incomplete building. It had rained the week before and the untreated timber would clearly not last out in the open.

“People from around here don’t know what an old-age home is,” he said. In rural villages such as these, the older people are not put into “homes”, he explained, adding that the younger family members had the responsibility to look after them. “Had they built a clinic or a recreational centre, it would have been better.”

Speaking to people living nearby, what soon became clear was that they knew very little about the construction or who was involved. Construction teams arrived earlier that year and, for a while, the place was a hive of activities. Everything stopped abruptly around March or April. My guide said that he had heard that the local contractors were not being paid.

No security guard was to be seen and the local headman was also not at home. It was December, everything was closing down, and we left the site with only unanswered questions.

Why the old-age home?

Early in January 2020, the NLC’s spokesperson, Mr Ndivhuho Mafela, responded to detailed questions about the Maila Village project and ignored a request for clarity as to who was involved.

“The delay was caused by contractual matters between the funded NPO and its contractors,” Mafela said. “The NLC-appointed engineers, together with the main contractor, are on site today, 21st January 2020, to discuss the technical issues and resumption date for construction. The NLC engineers will then advise on the revised schedule,” he said.

In October 2020 the sign had fallen down and it was already evident that discarded building material started disappearing.

Follow-up questions were ignored, and we again turned to documents in the public domain, including NLC annual reports and answers to written parliamentary questions, to try and establish what had happened.

Proactive funding 

The NLC’s 2018 annual report states that almost R285 million was used to fund 20 projects proactively.

“Most of the funding under the Charities Sector was for the construction of Old Age Homes and a Drug Rehabilitation Centre,” the report states. It also mentions that 93% of the proactive funding was spent on infrastructure projects. 

Public records and ongoing investigations since 2018 revealed that six old-age homes were funded in different provinces, each receiving an initial R20 million. Every single one has been dogged by problems and most, if not all, are still unfinished three years later.

Proactive funding differs from the NLC’s “normal” funding process as it is not call-driven. Instead of waiting for applications from non-profit entities, the NLC, its board or the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition can identify worthy projects to fund. Such projects are supposed to be well-researched, to verify that a definite need exists. Based on what we have seen so far, however, this is often not the case.

Once a need is identified, the NLC then proceeds to identify a suitable non-profit entity to drive the project. One could assume that such an entity would be experienced in handling multimillion-rand infrastructure projects, but this is not a prerequisite.

So, for example, the NLC instead tasked a dormant, inactive NPO from Soshanguve in Gauteng to handle the Limpopo-based old-age home construction.

Enters Mushumo Ushavha Zwanda

In October 2017, R20 million was paid over to Mushumo Ushavha Zwanda, a Soshanguve-based non-profit organisation (NPO).

In the 2018/19 financial year, another R3 million was paid to this entity and, from what could be established, a further R2,839 million was paid in May 2019. This brings the total paid to almost R26 million.

Building material, such as roof trusses, were left discarded on the premises after constructions teams abandoned the site. This photo was taken in 2020.

Prior to the Lottery funds’ being paid into its bank account, Mushumo was apparently not very active. It has no website, no social media activity and was first registered as an NPO on 18 May 2004.

In October 2011, the entity was also registered as a co-operative society (co-op), with nine founding members and three directors, Nomsa Maria Mathebula, Musandiwa Leonard Sidimela and Elizabeth Nenselwa Sono.

Since 2011, the records of the Company and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) show that no activity has taken place. No annual reports have been filed and no change in directorship was recorded. How the entity managed to submit two years’ annual financial statements to the NLC, which is a prerequisite for receiving such a large grant, is unclear.

Back to the ruins

In April 2020, months after the NLC’s Mafela promised that engineers would visit the project, nothing was still happening. Site visits were not possible as the country was placed in lockdown. Limpopo Mirror visited the site again in October 2020, only to find that the situation was much worse. The site was clearly also being vandalized.

This time we spoke to locals and interviewed the local headman, Joshua Nthabalala. He told us that the project was initially his, along with some other community members. They had planned to start a small communal farm and even received start-up guidance from Ms Mavhungu Lerule-Ramakhanya, currently Limpopo’s MEC for Transport and Community Safety.

“We had plans to fence off the place and seek funding from some provincial and national departments, so that we could build a chicken coop and buy chicken food and medicine,” he explained. They also planned to purchase some cattle.

But while they were still planning their project, “some people from Gauteng'”, who identified themselves as part of Mushumo Ushavha Zwanda, arrived and offered to build a state-of-the-art old-age home that would benefit the local aged, Nthabalala said. “We had no idea or plan for an old-age home, but we listened to them and thought that they had something new and that it was worth trying, so long as it benefited our people.”

Now he and Mavhungu Lerule and the local ward councillor, with the assistance of lawyers, are “busy ensuring that the project is completed”. “But then we would like to turn it into something else … not an ‘old-age home’ because we have got no plan in place for that,” he said.

However, Nthabalala was not clear on why lawyers were involved in his quest to have the project finished. “That’s my project and those people from Gauteng came and hijacked it.”

Finding the people behind Mushumo

After the NLC refused to disclose the names of the people behind Mushumo Ushavha Zwanda, we set out to trace its directors. 

Mushumo was registered as an NPO in 2004, which means that the reports should be publicly available at the NPO Directorate managed by the Department for Social Development. The department, however, failed to respond to several requests for details about the entity and its directors.

The damage to the half-built structures is clearly visible in this picture, taken in 2021.

We continued the quest by digging into CIPC records. One of the directors of the co-op, Musandiwa Leonard Sidimela, is a director of nine companies, varying from what appears to be a mining company to an aviation company. He is also a director of a fairly new NPC, Atlas Social Development Projects. Atlas has no involvement in the Limpopo old-age home debacle. Atlas SDP has a website with contact information, so we asked them to put us in contact with Sidimela.

“Due to Covid, (the) last time we had dealings with Mr Sidimela face to face, was in January 2020,” the company responded. Mr Sidimela is one of four directors of this non-profit company (NPC), which was started in early 2020. On their website, Atlas-SDP describe their core function as to “effectively and transparently manage grant funding raised toward Social Development Projects”.

The phone number provided for Mr Sidimela went to voicemail, so we sent him questions via email. He responded the same day but refused to elaborate on the project and the problems experienced.

“The project is still under (the) NLC, any public pronouncements or media statement are managed by (the) NLC,” he replied, referring our questions to the NLC’s media spokesperson, Mr Mafela. In his reply, he copied NLC officials, among them the one dealing with proactively funded projects, Marubini Ramatsekisa, and Tsietsi Maselwa, the NLC’s acting chief operating officer.

We responded to Sidimela, pointing out that a non-profit entity is legally and morally accountable to the community it professes to serve. The NLC had stated on numerous occasions in the past that it merely funded projects and did not drive them.

Sidimela eventually sent through some responses, which were mostly an attack on the newspaper. “I understand you want to write a juicy front-page story about that project, is it ok but don't lie or use information from third parties,” he wrote.

Sidimela denied that no consultation had taken place with the local community prior to the project’s starting. “We have the CLO (community liaison officer) from the community, all general labour comes from the community, the security comes from the community, the material comes from the community business, you see … if there is something untoward the community will have long revolted,” he said.

But who did the work?

One of the questions put to Sidimela was about the name of the contractors responsible for the construction work. In 2020, documents were leaked to an investigative journalist from GroundUp, which included bank statements for Upbrand Properties, a company linked to suspended NLC COO Phillemon Letwaba. The statements reveal a link between Upbrand and several of the unfinished old-age homes, including the one at Maila village.

Upbrand was also involved in an unfinished, shoddily built drug rehabilitation centre near Pretoria, which is currently being investigated by the Hawks and the Special Investigative Unit. In this case, a dormant, Limpopo-based NPO was hijacked and used to secure R27.5 million in funding for the drug-rehabilitation project. Upbrand Properties was appointed as contractors to build the centre. At the time, the sole director of Upbrand Properties was Johannes Letwaba, brother of the suspended NLC COO. He subsequently resigned as director of Upbrand.

In the period between December 2017 and November 2018, several references are made to “Maila”, “Mushumo” and “Lim old age” in the leaked bank statements of Upbrand Properties. They refer to salaries and wages, building material, rental of machinery and even the purchasing of safety equipment. More than R510 000 was paid out of the Upbrand account for what appears to be expenditure related to the old-age home at Maila village. In the same period, more than R300 000 was deposited into the account with “Mushumo – Lim old age” used as reference.

When Sidimela was asked about this, he denied any connection. “The company that we have appointed is MT Civils, the one you are talking about we know nothing about,” he said.

The only reference we could find to such a company was MT Civils and Plant Hire from Tzaneen. The address supplied is a residential home and Sidimela did not respond to requests for contact details.

During the visit to the construction site in October last year, we noticed a temporary shed next to the buildings, in which we found discarded building plans and notes. On the building plans, the engineers for the project are indicated as PKT Consulting Engineers.

This company also links back to the Lotto’s COO, Phillemon Letwaba. Apart from Letwaba, who resigned as director in March 2017, several members of his family, including his wife, are former members of PKT. Themba Mabundza, who resigned recently as the sole director, also has links to Letwaba. Sthembiso Jim Skosana, who is now the sole director, was appointed in July last year.

But wait, there’s more

After enquiring about Sidimela’s contact details from Atlas SDP, they asked why we were trying to contact him. We sent them a brief background of the situation at Maila village, as well as photographs of the deserted construction.

Atlas spokesperson Mr Mixalis Taxylas said: “(This) is not the way we do business, and is an indictment on the developmental sector,” he said.

Windows were broken and some window panes even removed.

Taxylas later wrote back, providing some feedback on preliminary information that they could gather. He said that, during a discussion in 2019 with one of Atlas SDP’s directors, Sidimela explained that his NPO (Mushumo Ushavha Zwanda) had been “hijacked”. Sidimela said he had reported the matter to the NLC, as well as the SAPS, Taxylas added.

We sent more questions to Sidimela, asking him about the hijacking of Mushumo, but he ignored all further requests for comment.

Taxylas said the directors of Atlas SDP had scheduled a meeting to discuss the situation. “We will be taking appropriate steps to ensure our unblemished record as a not-for-profit organisation remains intact,” he said.

A proposal would be tabled to provisionally suspend Mr Sidimela as a director while clarity is sought on the Maila village project, Taxylas added.

The NLC under scrutiny

In October last year, President Ramaphosa signed a proclamation authorising the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) to probe alleged corruption in the National Lotteries Commission. Both the SIU and a special Hawks task team are currently busy investigating several dodgy NLC projects. The SIU also raided the NLC’s offices in Pretoria in December last year. Several of the dodgy projects that the Limpopo Mirror has exposed, including the Denzhe Primary Care grant, form part of the investigation.

The Hawks were asked whether the old-age home projects were also being investigated but have not yet responded.

Detailed questions about the Maila village project were sent to NLC spokesperson Ndivhuho Mafela. He ignored these questions, as well as follow-up questions about the alleged hijacking of Mushumo Ushavha Zwanda.

Limpopo Mirror sent an email to the NLC’s commissioner, Thabane Mampane, asking whether the organisation was ignoring questions from some reporters. She did not respond.

Where to from here?

In his initial response, Sidimela blamed Mushumo’s absence from the old-age home site over the past 20 months on Covid-19. “We are trying to go back this year using skeleton staff. For instance, only staff that will be involved in roof installation will be allowed on-site, paving staff only will be allowed on site,” he said.

He told the Limpopo Mirror to “relax” and said: “...we will call you and the people of Limpopo once we have completed and (we will) celebrate together.”

Meanwhile, the old-age home at Maila village is literally falling to pieces. The unfinished structures are being vandalized and are rotting away.

The fence around the building site had been pushed down, presumably to make it easier for thieves to loot the building material.

When Limpopo Mirror visited the site this past weekend, the picture was a sad one. The fence surrounding the site was pushed down, presumably to allow looters to remove building material from the site. A group of young boys said that a big white truck and a bakkie had arrived to collect materials from the site.

The people from Maila village will seemingly have to wait for the promised old-age home, while questions about the R26-million in Lottery funding go unanswered. The Lotto sign board has also fallen off, rusting away on the ground.

 

Date:29 January 2021

By:

Read: 1742

 

ADVERTISEMENT

 

ADVERTISEMENT:

ADVERTISEMENT:

 

Recent Articles

ADVERTISEMENT

 

Popular Articles