It is very disheartening to watch a contract worth R4.3-million disappearing one pole at a time.
It is very disheartening to watch a contract worth R4.3-million disappearing one pole at a time.
Yet this is what Peet Grobler of Nyathi Game Fencing is having to deal with since he signed a year long contract in January to fence off the 50 km boundary of the army base. Even though he was ahead of his schedule, he had to rebuild the fence he had already erected because the main line poles had been stolen and the wires cut. Grobler will have to replace the poles, which are worth R100 each. He estimates that at least R80 000 worth of damage has been done to the fencing from the section he has inspected so far.
Grobler was hired to replace the fence at the army base that was erected five years ago which had also been stolen. The project has now become a financial burden as it is Grobler’s responsibility to maintain the fence until the engineers have signed off on it, which can only happen once the entire project has been completed. This means that he has to spend his own money to complete the job before he hands it over to Ben Coetzee, the training area manager of Grahamstown’s 6SAI Battalion.
Moreover, all repairs and construction at the base are processed by the Department of Public Works so the request for the fence to be replaced took three years to be granted. The initial request was for metal poles, but the department required that the same type as the original fencing had to be used. If metal poles had been used, Grobler said, they probably would have been stolen even sooner as they could be sold for scrap metal.
The application for re-fencing also included a request for an additional 30 km of electric fencing to be put up to protect the existing fence. This was given the go ahead but hasn’t happened yet due to an ongoing dispute between the department of Public Works and the facility division of the defence force as to who is going to provide the funding.
When asked why the army has not done anything about the stolen fencing, Coetzee explained that the 7000 or so hectares would have to effectively be patrolled on foot 24 hours a day and that the main function of the military is to train soldiers for combat. He went on to say that if the project is finally completed and handed over to the army, they would be stuck in the same situation as "it is difficult to be there at all times and as long as there is an object of interest to the public, there will be this problem". Coetzee suggested that this could possibly be overcome by creating a special post for people to guard the fence.
Grobler went to open a case with the police on Wednesday and suggested that the only way that the project was going to be finished was to "rebuild the fence and to have my own guards patrolling it until it is signed off". He questioned the idea of spending taxpayers’ money on a fence that is merely being destroyed because there is not enough manpower to maintain and protect it.
