premier.
His daughter, Thoko Malembe, started scoring FSHS contracts in
November 2013. Unital Holdings, the company in which she is a 30
per cent shareholder, received contracts worth more than R 150 million
from the department for the failed Vogelfontein housing project outside
Bethlehem. My work on this story for News 24 revealed that
Magashule’s office influenced the awarding of the contract, and that he
visited the site in person after Unital was appointed.^28 Magashule
denied influencing the awarding of the contract, but failed to or refused
to comment on his daughter’s stake in the company.
Despite clear indications that contractors linked to Magashule are
among the worst culprits when it comes to failed, delayed or
substandard RDP projects, these companies were excluded from the
FSHS’s attempts to recover wasted money.
In July 2015 , the Democratic Alliance asked the department to
provide figures on incomplete houses to the provincial legislature’s
portfolio committee on public works, infrastructure, roads, transport
and human settlements. Mokhesi came back with a truly shocking
number – there were almost 11 000 incomplete houses all over the
province, the HOD admitted.^29 Another submission to the portfolio
committee in 2018 failed to put a figure on the total number of
incomplete houses, but it confirmed that the problem had not been
resolved and that projects awarded to politically connected contractors
during 2010 had still not been completed.^30
The man who should be held accountable for this mess is Ace
Magashule. As evidenced by the myriad examples unpacked in this
chapter, Magashule clearly loomed large in the province’s allocation of
housing contracts during his time as premier. This allowed him to dish
nora
(Nora)
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