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Odendaal Comes in for an MBDA Spanking

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The MBDA released a statement today saying that they have been vindicated by todays court ruling.

According to the MBDA’s CEO Anele Qaba – who took the MBDA’s only shareholder and funder to court:

Today, the Judge ruled that the MBDA be paid all grants due, and further confirmed the standing of the MBDA Board. The city was ordered to pay all legal costs to the challenge. It is indeed a vindication of the position that the Board and the CEO have held, that these issues had no basis and should never have escalated to this level if it wasn’t for undue interference by Retief Odendaal.

MBDA CEO Anele Qaba
MBDA CEO Anele Qaba

Cllr Odendaal is the main perpetrator and should never have been allowed to in the way he did to try and destroy the one hope for the city, the MBDA due to his personal obsession with me. What is most shocking was his callous, irrational, and reckless statements about the implications of his actions to get the NMBM to withhold MBDA funds, him bragging in Council that the entity was in a financial distress due to it not even able to pay creditors. This was not expected to come from someone who claims to be a leader and acting in the interest of service delivery and the community at large. Thank Lord I was not derailed by his immature actions and held the fort.

You will recall that he is the same Cllr roughly on 2016 when he was the political head of Budget & Treasury who decided to cut all security budget from MBDA and as a result crime spiralled out of control in Central reversing all the hard work that MBDA had done to revitalise the CBD. He has therefore been trying to destroy MBDA brick by brick so he can claim the credit for resurrecting it.

I am raising this issue because when he became the mayor, there are allegations of him having improperly interfered in the procurement affairs and appointment processes of the MBDA and fortunately for him Council never even investigated the matter, let alone that I got no response or acknowledgment of the correspondence by the Speaker. As a result, the entity received an unqualified audit opinion with a finding which is a regress from the year preceding year.

Today we have a CBD that has fallen apart, projects stopped at a huge cost of public purse, part of city’s budget having been cut by National Treasury and the city having lost crucial marque game which should have been played in the NMB Stadium to East London due to the reckless and callous calls Cllr Odendaal made about illegally withholding MBDA grants. With Odendaal as an Attorney, you can’t say he didn’t know that what he was doing was unlawful. What is shocking is to have a legal firm supporting his view to a point that it defended this matter in court, the question is on whether the legal firm was acting in the interest of Council or whether it had provided an objective legal advice to Council. The motion made by Cllr Zumani should really be considered by Council if it is indeed serious in protecting the public purse from an alleged abuse through use of legal firms.

What also needs to be checked is on whether the legal expenses for this court process should not be recovered from all those who were involved in this unlawful campaign and must include Cllr Odendaal and Nqwazi, maybe Council should investigate this.

The fact is this, lying to the media and thus misleading public will always be exposed by the court, they might have won in the court of public opinion but had lost in the competent court of law where only truth matters, and lies thrown out of the window as per the case now.

In fact, Council should call for them to personally pay for the costs of this case. MBDA had advised on several occasions on this matter however, their vendetta against me blinded them to a point that they waste ratepayers’ money through court processes that were not at all necessary.

The level of interference into the MBDA affairs was on steroids to a point that they even wanted to play the role of a Board in a private company by even ignoring the governance structures that regulates the relationship between the MBDA and Municipality. In one instance a City Manager who took an item to Council to set aside and review my appointment without the recruitment process report from the Board and any allegations around it having been discussed by the Shareholder Representatives which should be making recommendations to Council.

This flawed process undermined the Company’s Act and the Memorandum of Incorporation which governs and regulates the relationship between these two separate entities. It is therefore shocking that Council was deliberately misguided to take a decision based on a flawed process and in a strong Council with strong oversight levers, someone should be accounting for this.

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Port Elizabethan

This author is a 'catch-all' for occasional articles and letters written to MyPE. The Author of each article can be found in the signature at the bottom of each individual article.