Gangster State

DORA [Division of Revenue Act], as the payment schedule was not
approved by Treasury,’ read the AG’s 2013 / 14 report on the
department.^25 It is not clear which ‘receiving entity’ was being referred
to. The AG also bemoaned the fact that the department had failed to
surrender unspent conditional grant monies that National Treasury had
forbidden it to keep. Nevertheless, the FDC now sat with a sizeable
chunk of the province’s housing funds. If the FDC had received the
money in an unlawful manner, it would be a long and arduous journey
for national government to retrieve it.
In early 2014 , the Vrede housing project kicked into gear. After the
official site handover in January, work commenced in May that year.^26
By October, less than six months into the project, the first signs of
trouble surfaced. The FDC had paid Tekeweni, the contractor from
KwaZulu-Natal, just over R 40 million in three instalments, including
an ‘EPHP advance’ payment in April.^27 Narsai told me the advance
payment amounted to about R 17 million and that it was used for
materials and other expenses related to the project.
But there seemed to be very little progress on site. In a letter
addressed to the director-general of the national Department of Human
Settlements, dated November 2014 , Narsai highlighted problems that
were hampering the project. They mostly related to what appeared to
have been a total lack of planning on behalf of the local municipality
and the Free State provincial government. The province’s list of
beneficiaries for the project was in tatters, and so Tekeweni and VNA
did not really know who they were building the houses for, Narsai
wrote. There was also no electricity supply to the site, and the water
supply was insufficient. All of this severely affected the small factory
Khaya Readykit had opened on site to manufacture their prefabricated