Pretoria News reports that the City of Tshwane has instituted a probe into a staggering R80 million paid as monthly salaries to more than 500 general workers hired by the municipality in 2019 for doing nothing.

The workers’ contracts were terminated in October last year after it was concluded that the posts were redundant. On 26 May, they marched to Tshwane House demanding to be reinstated into their positions, urging the City to figure out where they could be suitably placed for work. During the march, workers confessed that they had not performed any work for the municipality since their appointments in November 2019. “They were supposed to work in the waste department as general workers, but what happened is that they never got to work because there was no one willing to communicate with them. For 12 months taxpayers’ money was used to pay them while they were not performing any duties,” their leader, Cedric Cele, stated. Tshwane chief of staff Jordan Griffiths said on Tuesday that the municipality had instituted an investigation into the dubious hiring process for the workers, who were taken on board without specific job descriptions. He was reacting to the public comment by ActionSA provincial campaigns manager Abel Tau, who demanded that the City open “an investigation into the R80m salaries bungle engineered by the DA”.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Rapula Moatshe at Pretoria News

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