Peta Thornycroft and Mungo Soggot
Billy Cobbett will have the chance next week to stand up and publicly link his former boss, Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele, to the R185-million Motheo housing scandal.
Cobbett, former housing director general, has been called before the Mpumalanga government’s public commission of inquiry into the low- cost housing deal.
Until now he has kept silent about the concerns he raised when he reported the deal to the auditor general – a move that cost him his job.
Among the concerns surrounding the project is the minister’s close relationship with the owner of Motheo, Dr Thandi Ndlovu, whose company stood to make millions of rand from the deal.
The minister also had a close working relationship with sacked Nedcor banker, Kevin Gibb, who is accused by other players in the Motheo scheme of masterminding the deal. Mthembi-Mahanyele and other senior ANC officials have dismissed talk of the relationships as “media speculation”.
Premier Mathews Phosa, who also knew Ndlovu well, has insisted his inquiry will not cover these relationships. Mthembi- Mahanyele’s representative said the minister had “no comment” on whether she had met Gibb after he was fired, and said she had not been asked to testify at the Mpumalanga commission.
Nevertheless Cobbett could take the opportunity to detail what he knows of the relationships – and would be protected by the privileged status of the commission.
Cobbett’s testimony could be crucial in determining whether Mthembi-Mahanyele will escape the scandal unscathed. The public protector says he is awaiting the outcome of the Mpumalanga probe before investigating.
Cobbett insists his contract was “prematurely terminated”, but the minister has publicly stated that he resigned. Cobbett asked the minister not to launch the project in March, after discovering a string of procedural irregularities surrounding it.
Auditor General Henri Kluever’s request to Parliament for a commission of inquiry has so far been denied and the matter has instead been passed to the public protector.
Since the scandal broke in May a clearer picture has begun to emerge of the relationship between Gibb and the minister. Gibb said this week that he had seen the minister on a “very regular basis” up until Nedcor ousted him, but says he only discussed the Motheo project with her once.
He confirmed, however, that he saw the minister in Pretoria two days after he was fired. Gibb said he frequently spoke to Mthembi-Mahanyele about Cobbett’s failure to co-operate with him over other housing initiatives.
Gibb also confirmed that he arranged car financing for the minister’s former private secretary, Bertha Nene, but said Mthembi- Mahanyele knew nothing of it.
Gibb dismissed the auditor general’s report this week as “factual garbage” and said the investigators had not contacted him. The auditor general’s office was unable to confirm this at the time of going to press, but the official who steered the investigation said it was unlikely the private- sector auditors recruited for the probe had spoken to the sacked banker.
He said they had worked through “official channels” and had not contacted people who had “left the scene”. It has also emerged that the investigators did not contact some of the contractors who were lined up for the deal. Deputy auditor general Bertie Loots said he did not know details of who had been contacted, but said his office stood by the report.
Gibb, meanwhile, dismissed suggestions that Motheo stood to make at least R4 000 on each R14 000 house – a taking that would have landed it at least R40-million. He said the company was more likely to have made a 5% profit, or R10-million -which is still high for low-cost housing.
Gibb said that, compared with many other housing contracts, the Motheo deal was relatively solid. One of the contentious parts of the contract was the decision on the part of the provincial government to award the company an extra R2 250 for bad soil – a discretionary subsidy that is not supposed to be granted in bulk, but on a case-by-case basis.