Makana Municipality has rejected Grocott’s Mail’s formal request for information that led to the dismissal of the former municipal manager, Ntombi Baart. The rejection letter was delivered to our newsroom on Friday, a few days after we handed in an application form in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) asking for details about the procedure undertaken to terminate Baart’s contract.
We know that her contract still had 11 months to run when it was terminated following a secretive suspension procedure and equally secret negotiations with her lawyers.
We know that a charge sheet was drawn up in preparation for a disciplinary hearing and that most of the items on that secret document concerned inappropriate allocation of municipal funds.
We don’t know whether any money was wasted, misspent or simply stolen because the municipality refuses to tell us.
We also don’t know if there are other senior officials or councillors involved in what look suspiciously like corrupt activities, because all proceedings relating to Baart’s dismissal were held behind closed doors, and all our questions relating to this issue have been rejected.
The grounds for rejecting our PAIA request are twofold. The first reason was that the information is subject to a confidentiality agreement entered into between the municipality and the former municipal manager. Following this rationale, anyone can hide nefarious activities from the public simply by signing a confidentiality agreement with someone else.
At the very least it appears that Makana Municipality has been acting unconstitutionally, as the South African constitution unequivocally states in Section 32 that everyone has the right of access to any information held by the state.
The second reason given for not sharing information concerning the termination of Baart’s contract is far more interesting. The rejection letter cites a section in the PAIA about mandatory protection of commercial information of third party.
This means that if we find out why Baart was fired it could harm the financial interests of a third party. This is very intriguing because we cannot imagine what she could have done to implicate a third party in dealings that Makana Municipality wants to keep secret. There could be many reasons for wanting to keep that information away from Makana residents, but we cannot think of one that would serve the interests of the public.
We are disappointed that the municipality decided to reject our PAIA request. We believe it was the wrong decision, but it is not surprising given councillors' penchant for evicting the media from Council Chambers every time they feel embarrassed about what they were doing.
Grocott’s Mail is currently consulting with the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM) about how to take this matter further
