Helen Botes. Remember that name.
The Johannesburg Property Company (JPC) CEO has been touted as a possible candidate to take on the mantle of municipal manager in Joburg, city sources have told both Eyewitness News and TimesLive.
If those sources are correct, it’s not great news for Joburg. This is a city with a self-made water crisis, neglected and crumbling road infrastructure, sketchy power grid, hijacked and abandoned buildings, soaring crime, poverty, inequality and a multitude of other sins. It’s a city brought to its knees by corruption, patronage, ineptitude, neglect and indifference, and deeply mediocre leadership.
What Joburg needs is to be put under administration; it needs technocrats. It does not need to be run by the CEO of another cash-strapped city entity with serious question marks hanging over them.
If Botes does indeed become municipal manager, she would, as head of the city’s administration, be responsible for all income and expenditure by the municipality. In Joburg, that’s a budget of a cool R83bn.
Importantly, the municipal manager, as the city’s accounting officer, is responsible for compliance with municipal financial management legislation.
On that count, Botes may be one joker short of a full deck. Back in 2022, she was suspended – along with her CFO – for questionable Covid fogging contracts.
The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) found the pair could be responsible for fruitless and wasteful expenditure to the tune of R18m. According to the JPC annual report, the SIU flagged issues around inflated prices, procurement and supply chain management. A separate investigation by law firm Kunene Ramapala Inc reportedly also found irregularities.
After the SIU submitted its report, Botes was suspended. But she was later reinstated by the board, as the legal counsel appointed by the JPC found it shouldn’t proceed with charges. The SIU report, meanwhile, is apparently languishing in city hall. Three sets of findings – one contradictory – leave questions swirling around the CEO.
As accounting officer for an organisation facing “budgetary constraints”, Botes has also overseen substantial fruitless and wasteful expenditure on building rentals. Now, you could ask yourself why a company with 30,000-odd properties on its books needs to lease additional properties for city operations — but that would be to impute rationality where there is none.
Take the primary reason for the fruitless and wasteful expenditure: unused office space. Over three years (2019/20-2021/22) the JPC racked up R61.4m in rentals for empty buildings – including office space in its own HQ. This is a property management company, in other words, that manages property about as well as a sloth manages a bicycle.
So tell me again about that R83bn budget.
The big spend
But wait, there’s more ratepayer-funded fun and games. There’s the JPC’s awfully ambitious “Office Space Optimisation Programme” – a heady bureaucratic dream with a price tag of R12bn. The programme, involving 900,000m2 of space, envisions that a “restructuring of the city will be enabled by using investment in its own offices as a catalyst for redevelopment”.
Not investing in fixing the city’s crumbling infrastructure, mind you, but in office space. Makes sense.
The Daily Maverick’s Ferial Haffajee has been following the story since last December. She reported that the design of the behemoth – the revamp of eight administrative precincts – comes courtesy of Bayete Capital. This is a company headed up by the politically connected Lonwabo Sambudla – the former son-in-law of Jacob Zuma and former head of the ANC Youth League’s Lembede Investments.
A 2014 letter on the JPC website awards phase 1 (design) and phase 2 (implementation management) of an office space optimisation programme to Bayete-Pamoja consortium as turnkey manager, subject to a service level agreement being signed. The document is signed by Botes and Sambudla, at a time when Zuma was president of South Africa.
As part of the broader project, the Metro Centre is getting a fix-up and facelift – at a cost of anywhere between R800m and R2bn.
In part, that’s apparently thanks to two fires at the city’s nerve centre; they’ve left the city swearing blind that the building is now uninhabitable (that’s in dispute). Anyway, the result is that Joburg’s staff have been “decanted” to leased buildings – at a princely R120m a year for the five to 10-odd years it will take to fix the mothership.
As part of this, the mayor’s office has decamped to a building owned by Sambudla’s Bayete. It’s one of at least three buildings that have reportedly been leased from his company.
Bayete, as you’d expect, has previously insisted it followed tender processes along with other companies.
Still, you have to wonder why the JPC is so keen to continue to do business with Sambudla – particularly as it apparently had its fingers burnt with him before.
Haffajee points to a News24 report from 2022, which suggests Bayete was involved in the revamp of the city’s dilapidated licensing departments. The cost of the project reportedly ballooned from R16m to R31m, according to JPC figures the publication had seen. And critically, it seemed the work had not been done at the time, though the company and the JPC claimed otherwise.
More recently, buildings owned by Bayete and leased to the city – including the mayor’s temporary digs – had their utilities cut off for lack of payment. (Bayete has claimed this was due to a “miscommunication”.)
At best, the JPC and accounting officer Botes are gluttons for punishment. At worst, it may speak to the power of political connections in a city already ruined by patronage networks.
The 77
But it’s more than that. If there’s one thing that should disqualify Botes from the municipal manager position right off the bat it’s the blight that is the Usindiso Building.
When the smoke cleared from the former pass office at 18 Albert Street, 77 people lay dead – the result of a devastating fire in a death-trap building left to rot by the JPC.
It’s worth returning to the evidence given to the Khampepe commission of inquiry into the tragedy. It showed the building was hijacked and overcrowded; reinforced steel supporting the columns, pillars and slabs had been removed and sold for scrap; stairwells had been converted into rooms, and additional rooms encroached on passageways. With water and electricity cut off, fire-fighting installations were used for domestic water consumption and residents were hooked up to the power transformer. Safety escape doors had been welded shut, and steel gates installed in escape passages on each floor were locked with chains.
Eleven bodies on the second floor alone were found behind locked gates.
And the JPC – and Botes – knew much of this. Not only had the department of social development recommended to the JPC in late 2018 that the building be shut down, a JPC “blitz” on the building in 2019 revealed the parlous state it was in.
Botes herself conceded “awareness” of the following facts: that the building was hijacked, illegally occupied and overcrowded; it was uninhabitable; crime was rife; it had illegal electricity and water connections; and a lack of firefighting equipment and installations. Perhaps most damningly, she conceded that the JPC had failed to maintain the property since 2003.
The Khampepe commission found the JPC at least partly responsible for the tragedy – and held that the board should consider taking appropriate action against Botes “for the total disregard of managing the Usindiso building despite knowledge of the disastrous state since at least 2019”.
It’s now over a year since the fire, and seven months since the Khampepe report was released, and it’s unclear that any action has been taken. Which leaves further clouds hanging over Botes’s head.
In any event, an accounting officer who allows 77 people to die on her watch due to what could be described as her company’s negligence – not to mention utter indifference – should at the least be removed from her position. Certainly, she should not be promoted given these question marks, catapulted into the highest administrative office in the country’s biggest metro.
The people of Joburg deserve better. The sinking city deserves better.
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