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Left: Tshilidzi Mutheiwana, Uprising Youth Development’s technician. Right: Bilaal Gunguwo. Facebook.

R5.5 million grant paid into mystery bank account

 

By Tshifhiwa Mukwevho and Anton van Zyl

A Louis Trichardt-based non-profit organisation (NPO) apparently knows nothing about a R5.5 million Lottery grant that was paid into a mystery bank account opened in its name.

Tshilidzi Mutheiwana, the spokesperson for the NPO, Uprising Youth Development (UYD), said they had never applied for the grant and had not received the money. When the NPO became aware that its name was on the list of beneficiaries, it contacted the NLC for an explanation, Mutheiwana said. 

“(They) confirmed that an amount of R5.5 million was paid into an FNB account in March 2019,” Mutheiwana said. UYD had laid a criminal complaint with the police after they had learnt about the payment into the mystery account, he said.

Mutheiwana , who described himself as UYD’s “technician”, said they had first become aware of the Lottery funding after the Department of Social Development (DSD) contacted one of the organisation’s members to ask about the funded project, and how the money was spent.

When UYD started investigating, they immediately realised something was wrong, Mutheiwana said. He claimed that a copy of an ID of one of the board members had allegedly been fraudulently certified at the Atteridgeville Police Station in Pretoria and been used to open a bank account at FNB for the NPO.

“We found out who used that ID copy to open an account, and we reported the case to the Makhado Police Station in March this year,” he said. “He said he got our NPO’s documents from us, but he is lying. Now he is nowhere to be found. He is from Vuwani. He is said to have many other criminal cases [being investigated against him], but the police are doing nothing about it.”

The Limpopo police’s spokesperson, Col Moatshe Ngoepe, confirmed that a criminal complaint had been laid, but said the case had been closed because of a lack of evidence. Ngoepe said a case had been opened at the Makhado Police Station, after a complainant had alleged that a bank account had been fraudulently opened in the name of Uprising Youth Development. The fraud was allegedly spotted when the NPO’s members tried to open a new account on 13 March 2020, Ngoepe said.

Ngoepe said the police did not know who had opened the alleged fraudulent account in UYD’s name. The NPO certificate, registration number and the signature of the DSD director were different on the application form that was filled in. He said that, because of a lack of information, the docket was closed on 29 May 2020.

Responding to emailed questions, NLC spokesperson Ndivhuho Mafela said: “A complaint was lodged with the NLC regarding the Uprising Youth Development NPO and the NLC instituted an investigation on the matter. The NLC has since taken a decision to refer the matter to the police,” he said. 

Mafela failed to respond to a request for details about the funded project in the Northern Cape, even though UYD is based in Limpopo. He also failed to comment about allegations that people purporting to be from the NLC had tried to bribe a member of the NPO to withdraw the complaint.

The Hawks’ spokesperson, Col Katlego Mogale, could not confirm whether the matter was under investigation and instead asked for details as to where the matter had been reported.

In October this year, the Hawks had reportedly set up a special task team to investigate Lottery corruption. 

Uprising pops up on list of grants

After publishing details of Lottery grants in its annual report for the previous 18 years, the NLC suddenly stopped publishing this list in 2019, claiming that doing so would be illegal. However, the NLC buckled under pressure from civil society and the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, Ebrahim Patel, earlier this year and supplied Parliament with a list of organisations that had benefited from Lottery funding. 

Soon afterwards, Democratic Alliance MP Mat Cuthbert raised the alarm about Uprising’s multi-million-rand grant, pointing out that while UYD was based in Limpopo, the funding was for a project in the Northern Cape. The NLC refused to say what the funded project entailed.

UYD’s registered address is at 30 Joubert Street, Louis Trichardt, according to the records of the DSD. The office bearers are listed as Bilaal Gunguwo (contact person), URN Nthangeni (secretary), L C Matumba (vice-secretary), R Magavha (treasurer), AE Muedi (chairperson), and M Maanda (vice-chairperson). 

The NPO was registered on 29 May 2015 with the aim of “uplifting the youth by taking them out of the street and keeping them busy or exploring their talents”, according to the DSD’s records. But a visit to the NPO’s registered address raised several red flags, as only a dilapidated old house from where a cross-border funeral service that ferries bodies to Zimbabwe operates, is found on the premises.

The NPO has no recent online presence and information about its activities is limited to reports in the Limpopo Mirror about youth programmes that the NPO launched in 2015 and in 2016.

Finding the NPO

The phone number listed with the DSD as the organisation’s contact person, Bilaal Gunguwo, does not work, but Mirror traced him via the owner of the property. 

When asked about the R5,5 million grant, paid out in the 2018/19 financial year, Gunguwo said he did not wish to speak by phone and said he would visit the newspaper’s office to explain, but he never did.

Contacted two days later, he said that his organisation had not received any money from the Lottery but needed to “get to the bottom of the story”. He refused to answer further questions and accused the newspaper of branding him as “a criminal”. 

Contacted again a few weeks later, he once again accused the newspaper of painting him as a criminal and ended the call abruptly.

Soon afterwards, Tshilidzi Mutheiwana, who was willing to provide more detail, contacted the paper. Mutheiwana is not listed as an office bearer by the DSD but described himself as the organisation’s “technician”. He was adamant that UYD had “at no stage” applied for any NLC funding, adding that it had had no contact with NLC officials and had not been requested to get involved with any NLC-funded projects.

“That’s when we visited the bank for clarity, and we were told that the existing account was closed without our authorisation and a new account was opened, which then received the funds.”

“They tried to bribe us”

Gunguwo was later approached by people from the NLC and offered R60 000 for the NPO to drop the complaint to the police, Mutheiwana claimed.

Asked if the fraud had been reported to the NLC, Mutheiwana said that the organisation was “very aware” of what had happened. “We are sitting with the knowledge that the NLC had approved the R5.5 million grant without a constitution of our organisation,” he said. “Is it not a requirement for an organisation to supply any funding body with a constitution before they can be considered for funding?”

He added that they had met with the police’s investigating officers. But the process was “very frustrating” as the police had told them that they first had to obtain “certain information”. 

“The issue we face now is that the police are not helping with the case; they keep handing over [the case] to different investigating officers.”

As transparent as a toilet window

The NLC has a notoriously bad record regarding transparency about grants. It has used a regulation aimed at its distribution agencies to not disclose information about projects and claimed that journalists were “making money” by using the information. Earlier this year, the NLC even threatened to lay criminal charges against journalists if they continued to write about lottery-funded projects.

Since 2018, the Limpopo Mirror has reported on several cases where NPOs were apparently hi-jacked and used to obtain NLC funding. We first exposed the Denzhe Primary Care case, where a Vhembe-based NPO was used to obtain more than R27 million in lottery funding to build a drug rehabilitation centre in Gauteng. More than R20 million of this money still cannot be accounted for. This is one of the cases currently being investigated by a team of investigators from the Hawks.

Earlier this year, Limpopo Mirror also wrote about the Vyeboom Youth Development structure. According to NLC records, this NPO has received R15,1 million in grant funding since 2017. The people involved with the NPO deny any knowledge of the funding. The NLC has thus far refused to provide more information as to exactly what they had funded in Vyeboom.

The grant awarded to UYD was done under the NLC’s proactive funding model. This model of funding was introduced in 2015 and allows the relevant Minister, the NLC’s board or the NLC itself to identify projects and then allocate the funding. In effect, this means that a worthy project is identified (following proper research) and an “operator” is found to manage the project.

The grounds upon which the NLC appointed a small, Louis Trichardt-based NPO to run a R5,5 million project in the Northern Cape are unclear. Had the NLC done the most basic due diligence, it would have found that UYD had no track record of managing large capital projects.

In October this year, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a proclamation authorising the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) to probe alleged corruption and maladministration at the NLC. The proclamation came into effect when it was published in the Government Gazette on Friday, 6 November. The decision to involve the SIU comes in the wake of ongoing reporting of corruption involving Lottery grants running into hundreds of millions of rands.

 

The listed address for Uprising Youth Development is 30 Joubert Street, Louis Trichardt, which is a dilapidated old house from where a cross-border funeral transport service is being run.

 

Date:05 December 2020

By: Tshifhiwa Mukwevho

Tshifhiwa Given Mukwevho was born in 1984 in Madombidzha village, not far from Louis Trichardt in the Limpopo Province. After submitting articles for roughly a year for Limpopo Mirror's youth supplement, Makoya, he started writing for the main newspaper. He is a prolific writer who published his first book, titled A Traumatic Revenge in 2011. It focusses on life on the street and how to survive amidst poverty. His second book titled The Violent Gestures of Life was published in 2014.

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