Durban — The first witness in the case against former mayor of eThekwini Municipality Zandile Gumede and 21 others insisted on Wednesday in the Durban High Court, that the disciplinary board within the municipality does not get involved in forensic investigations, especially those involving fraud and corruption.
Mbuso Ngcobo, who is the head of eThekwini’s City Integrity and Investigations Unit (CIIU), said this during cross-examination by the defence, advocate Jay Naidoo who is representing Gumede and some of her co-accused. Naidoo had been questioning Ngcobo on regulations and procedures of the municipality pertaining internal investigations and how the Investigations and Forensic Solutions (IFS) got the tender to do the investigation.
Naidoo argued that Ngcobo should have also included the disciplinary board in the investigation on tender irregularities. Ngcobo said the City’s policy states that the board should be involved in such matters.
Ngcobo said when there is a complaint they cannot alert people inside where the problem might be.
Ngcobo told the court that there are laws that guide them.
“We don’t want to come with conclusions that are baseless. We are bound by policies and regulations,” said Ngcobo.
Naidoo further questioned him on the appointment of the IFS and Ngcobo said what he did as the head of the CIIU was to authorise the IFS into starting the investigation as his team had recommended that they get forensics externally, after they had received a stack of documents from a complainant who wanted to remain anonymous, alerting them on tender irregularities.
Ngcobo told the court that Sipho Nzuza who was the city manager at the time, had already approved the tender of IFS which was among the 17 companies that the city got to assist the CIIU on its investigations as there was a backlog.
Ngcobo read the court a letter that was signed by Nzuza, on March 16, 2018, which said: “I hereby accept your tender for the provision of services for the period of 24 months.”
The defence wanted to know if other companies were given a chance to bid to get this job of investigating this matter, as the policy states that three companies should bid for such.
Ngcobo explained that there was a CIIU project management team that dealt with such. He said the team would look at the quotations of the three different companies and they would recommend one company to him afterwards.
Ngcobo explained to the court that he did not see anything suspicious when his team recommended IFS, otherwise he would have made enquiries and not authorised them to investigate.
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