DA cries foul over R121 million spent on shoddy Kopanong Hospital

DA spokesperson for infrastructure development, Nico De Jager.Image: Dimpho Maja/ African News Agency (ANA)

DA spokesperson for infrastructure development, Nico De Jager.Image: Dimpho Maja/ African News Agency (ANA)

Published Aug 9, 2022

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The DA has decried the lack of progress being made to complete the R208 million Kopanong Hospital project, which should have been completed in 2021. The party, which recently visited the facility, says it was shocked at the state of the project and the lack of progress being made even though more than R121m had been spent.

The party said the Gauteng department of infrastructure development had nothing to show for the multimillion rand project which began in 2020.

"The addition of a new building to this hospital was started in 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and was supposed to be completed by 2021. This project is far from completion and there are serious issues with the contractor, Concor and the sub-contractors, " says DA spokesperson for infrastructure development, Nico De Jager.

De Jager said MEC for health, Dr Nomathemba Mokgethi and MEC for infrastructural development, Tasneem Montara, were yet to conduct their own site inspections of the facility to see the state of this project, which risked being invaded by criminals.

"The MEC for health, Nomathemba Mokgethi and MEC Tasneem Motara have not yet inspected this project and have no clue what the true state of Kopanong Hospital is. If they had, then both the MECs would have reported the issues to the oversight committee," De Jager says.

De Jager said the delay in completion of the project pointed to lack of expertise and project management skills on the part of contractors which was why the project stalled.

"The contractor has also failed to pay the sub-contractors and the Gauteng department of infrastructure development has also failed to upskill the SMEs involved on this project. Furthermore, we also discovered that the weeds are at least two metres high and the workmanship is shoddy. In addition, there is no security and it is a matter of time before we will see this project being vandalised," the party says.

The DA lamented the lack of accountability in the project and said it would be requesting both MECs to appear before the infrastructure development portfolio committee to account for the millions of rands spent on this project.

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