Durban - eThekwini Municipality this week retracted an engineering report into the Umdloti floods, prompting residents to have it independently verified and calling on the municipality for the reasons for the retraction.
Environmental justice campaigner Nicole Barlow, who is acting for them, said they didn’t accept the retraction, which came after the City released a copy, and “we shall keep distributing this report” until an independent commission of inquiry was set up.
Kevin Minter-Brown, a resident who has been speaking on behalf of the community, confirmed that Barlow was acting for them. He said the community had raised money to pay legal fees and that he would instruct the municipality to present its exact reasons for the withdrawal of the report by Monday afternoon.
“If they fail to respond or the reasons aren’t feasible or legitimate, then we can draw the conclusion that it was the result of pressure from the developer and that we are safe to charge the city manager.”
The City referred the Independent on Saturday to a statement released earlier in the week in which City spokesman Msawakhe Mayisela apologised for releasing the report “prematurely before exhausting internal processes related to reports of this nature”.
“We fully understand the inconvenience the retraction may have caused to members of the media and other parties interested in this matter. In due course, the report will be officially released.
“We appreciate the interest members of the media have in this report. However, we are humbly appealing for it to not be disseminated as it is not yet an official report.”
Mayisela said the city “would like to state it categorically to the members of the media that there is nothing that is hidden and there is nothing sinister about retracting it”.
“Like any other organisation, we are not infallible and we therefore appeal to members of the media to accept this as our official response to the questions that were sent to us.”
The Independent on Saturday