African National Congress secretary-general, Ace Magashule, is not fit for public office and should be behind bars.
That's according to former Free State Economic Development MEC,Mxolisi Dukwana, who was giving evidence to the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture on the alleged looting of R255m from the Free State Department of Human Settlements.
This, he told Deputy Chief justice, Raymond Zondo, was done through an unsolicited audit project to remove asbestos roofing on 300 000 houses in the Free State, using an external service provider who he said did not do the work but had been paid.
The Commission heard that the contract was awarded to the Diamond Hill-Blackhead Consulting joint venture by the Free State housing department in 2014 and that the appointment letter said that 300 000 houses with asbestos roofs needed to be audited, assessed and their GPS coordinates logged at R850 per unit.
Dukwana said that officials simply took the amount R225m allocated for the project, divided that by the R850 that would be charged to assess each unit and then arrived at the 300 000-unit figure.
He said no prior assessment had been done by the department to arrive at an accurate number of units to be audited.
Dukwana said that Magashule had allegedly "committed fraud and money laundering by distributing kickbacks from the asbestos eradication project using a service provider to do so".
"With the information that we have presented today, and many others, I submit that the involvement of Mr Magashule in this asbestos audit heist, makes him unfit to hold public office or the office of the secretary-general of the ANC," he said.
"Mr Magashule's suitable place of abode in public is a jail cell," Dukwana said.
He also said that those who aided Magashule in this scheme must be called by the commission to come and explain, and this included a High Court judge.
