FOUR Bulawayo councillors have been implicated in an
alleged tender scandal after a prospective parking management company allegedly
pampered them with five-star hotel junkets among other goodies, Sunday News can
reveal.
The councillors’ Harare “trip of shame” is suspected to be
part of a plot by the company to sway the vote in its favour for a car parking
management tender in Bulawayo. The tender issue has also raised the ire of the
Bulawayo Residents Association.
The Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association has since
written to the Town Clerk, Mr Christopher Dube, demanding that the four
councillors be investigated and the implicated company disqualified from any
future dealings with the local authority.
The letter, signed by BPRA co-ordinator, Mr Emmanuel
Ndlovu, was also copied to Bulawayo Mayor, Councillor Solomon Mguni, Deputy Mayor Clr Tinashe
Kambarami, Chamber Secretary Mrs Sikhangele Zhou, Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption
Commission, Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Local Government and the
Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe.
“We are worried about the information that four Bulawayo
councillors had prior secret meetings with (name withheld) at a hotel in
Harare, where the company met the hotel expenses for the councillors. The major
concern is, why were the meetings held under ‘darkness cover’ of the public and
why were hotel bills for the councillors met by an interested party? We feel
the conduct of the councillors concerned as public officials is tantamount to
criminal abuse of office which is criminalised in terms of Section 174 of the
Criminal Law Codification and Reform Act, (Chapter 9:23),” wrote Mr Ndlovu.
The residents association called on council and the
relevant authorities to institute an investigation on the four. Bulawayo acting
Town Clerk, Mrs Zhou confirmed that they had received information regarding the
alleged conduct of the four councillors and were carrying out investigations to
get to the bottom of the matter.
“We have since instructed our audit team to carry out the
necessary investigations to come out with the facts on this issue. What we are
saying is allegations can be made, but it is now a matter of deducing the facts
of these allegations,” said Mrs Zhou.
Evidence gathered by Sunday News in a four-week
investigation revealed that the quartet was booked into a Harare hotel (name
withheld) and all hotel expenses, which amounted to $1 860 were met by the
parking company which is jostling to win a tender in Bulawayo. This publication
is also in possession of room numbers where the four were booked. According to documents seen by this
publication, the four were booked at the hotel on 9 May 2019 and checked out
the following day in the morning. They were also taken for a tour of the
company’s operations.
Sunday News contacted the four councillors in the eye of
the storm and they all denied having met the implicated company officials. When
this publication sought a comment from the parking company, its officials also
denied any wrong doing.
The parking management services tender in Bulawayo was
cancelled in 2012 after what the local authority termed “a shambolic tendering
process”. This was after the local
authority had awarded the tender to Megalithic Marketing Private Limited,
resulting in a long court battle with the company contesting council’s decision
to cancel the tender.
In April last year, the local authority shortlisted two
companies — Ducretion Logistics Private Limited and Lauvax Trading Private
Limited trading as Propark — for consideration to manage the city’s parking
where motorists would pay for parking for a prescribed period, starting from an
hour. The two companies were to share different sites within the city, but the
deal was never finalised.
The parking management tender has taken seven years to be
implemented and was only revived last
year after then ward Six councillor (now Makokoba MP), James Sithole filed a
motion where he noted that the legal wrangle was almost at its end, hence they
should re-tender the project to help enhance revenue collection and service
delivery.
“In an effort to boost revenue for the City of Bulawayo, we
flighted a tender more than six years ago for Parking Management Services from
reputable companies. Due to some irregularities in the process this matter
ended up in the courts . . . Bulawayo City Council has therefore lost several
opportunities such as 400 jobs that could have been created, meaning the
survival of 400 households and parking revenue in the region of $10 million. I propose that council proceeds as a matter
of urgency to re-tender for the parking management services since the legal
wrangle has been concluded so that we can achieve revenue enhancement and
improved service delivery,” reads part of the motion.
The initial bidding process brought the city’s tendering
system under scrutiny, with accusations of corruption among councillors and
council directors flying around.
First, Easipark, the South African company that was
favourite to clinch the parking deal, was disqualified on allegations of
attempting to bribe members of the procurement board to swing the bid in its
favour.
The company was readmitted and the tendering process
re-done after consultations among stakeholders. Easipark was disqualified
again, after it failed to attend a compulsory tender briefing meeting, which
then saw Megalithic being awarded the tender. Sunday Mail
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