‘The Shilowa Express has sprinted ahead and now people are starting to plan how to derail the campaign. My conscience is very clear,” Congress of the People deputy president Mbhazima Shilowa said on Thursday.
Speaking from Tokyo, Japan, Shilowa was reacting to allegations of financial mismanagement made against him this week by Cope president Mosiuoa Lekota.
Shilowa told the Mail & Guardian that Lekota is using the allegations to damage his (Shilowa’s) campaign to become Cope president at the party’s conference, scheduled for the end of May.
He claimed the allegations that he delayed an audit of Cope’s books are baseless because ‘the financial year only ended on March 31 and April was used to consolidate all the information”.
Lekota alleged at a media conference this week that Shilowa ‘possibly mismanaged public funds” and may have committed fraud with funds allocated to the party through Parliament and the Independent Electoral Commission.
Shilowa berated Lekota for using the media to fight campaign battles, while Cope general secretary Charlotte Lobe said that the allegations against Shilowa were a ‘campaign ploy” by Lekota.
Insiders say Shilowa is the frontrunner to become Cope’s president. His supporters include heavyweights such as Lobe, who runs the Cope head office, general secretary of Cope’s Youth Movement, Malusi Booi, and firebrand youth leader Anele Mda.
In Lekota’s corner are former ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, Cope spokesperson Philip Dexter, Cope labour convener Willy Madisha and former New National Party provincial MP Juli Killian.
Lekota’s supporters have launched a ‘Cope for Hope” campaign, hosting events with Lekota as guest speaker, to raise funds for Lekota’s bid to retain the presidency.
At the centre of Lekota’s allegations is Shilowa’s attempt to backdate the appointment of accounting firm Visser Louw Professional Accountants, hired to audit payments from the Independent Electoral Commission fund and parliamentary allocations for Cope’s constituencies and caucus.
Lekota’s backers allege that Shilowa aimed to siphon funds to his presidential campaign by claiming that more money was paid to the accountants than they actually received.
A letter of appointment sent to Visser Louw on March 8 was dated June 1 2009, but an accompanying email from Shilowa’s assistant, Jen de Wet, gave the correct date. Both documents are in the M&G‘s possession. A partner at the firm, Anton Louw, later wrote back refusing to have the auditors’ appointment backdated by nine months.
Louw’s letter said any backdating would violate company policy. ‘Fees will not be backdated and will only be of effect for work done from March 1 2010,” Louw wrote in the letter, also in the M&G‘s possession. The IEC funding was removed from the firm’s mandate after the company refused to backdate its appointment.
Shilowa said that the correspondence shows no wrongdoing on his part. ‘It simply confirms that there has been a process to appoint the auditors. There is no way in which you can pay someone for work they did not do,” he said.
But Lekota’s backers insist Shilowa should be taken to task. ‘From June last year until now there was no auditor and that is illegal. Now he is trying to cover his tracks,” said an MP sympathetic to Lekota. ‘They’re trying to keep these issues off the agenda, go to the conference and remove Terror and then clean up the mess after that.”
Shilowa has been accused of nepotism, with party insiders claiming that he facilitates the award of contracts to his backers in the party. One example cited is that of a R580 000 tender to furnish party offices, which went to Booi’s C-Yoyo Logistics.
‘All the prices were inflated to put money into the coffers of the Shilowa camp,” said a pro-Lekota MP. Booi denied any wrongdoing, saying the party used the standard three-quotation system and that his company’s bid was selected as the best.
Cope spokesperson Dexter said Lekota had raised concerns about Cope’s finances at several meetings of the congress national committee. ‘Some are being investigated by a task team and we are awaiting a report,” Dexter said