---

At one stage the rural Nkomazi Local Municipality paid R80 million a year in overtime claims.

---

Sizwe sama Yende

---

Greedy employees in Mpumalanga’s Nkomazi municipality have been milking coffers dry with excessive overtime claims – a matter that ANC activist Sizwe Nyambi raised few hours before he was ambushed and shot on Tuesday night.

Nyambi was an outspoken activist with an acerbic tongue known over the years for live Facebook video outbursts to raise awareness on any political or service delivery related issues.

The night he was shot, reportedly six times in the head, he had spoken out about Nkomazi’s municipal employees’ role in sabotaging water infrastructure because they were hell-bent on continuing to claim large amounts in overtime.

Nkomazi near Malalane is a sprawl of underdeveloped rural villages with uncontrollable population growth due to influx of illegal foreigners from the neighbouring Mozambique and Swaziland. The municipality therefore struggles to meet its service delivery expectation as it has a small tax base.

Nkomazi council manager, Xolani Mabila, confirmed that he had to take measures to drastically reduce overtime claims when the municipality paid R80 million in one financial year.

“We budgeted R20 million for overtime, but employees believe that it is standard to work overtime and we were spending over R5 million a month,” Mabila said.

Mabila said that he capped overtime work to 24 hours, from 40 hours a month, as this matter was putting the municipality at loggerheads with the Auditor-General and gnawing budgets allocated for other services.

 He said that workers were disgruntled and even went on strike accompanied by some of their colleagues who did not qualify to claim for working extra hours.

“Once everyone is used to the new order, we will consider allocating more hours for essential services workers like traffic cops and firefighters. They could, maybe, be 32 hours,” Mabila said.

“At the present moment you will find a clerk who sits in office claiming overtime or a senior official who is not a fieldworker also submitting a claim.”

Mabila said that water services employees usually embarked on a go slow, claiming that they had reached their 24-hour overtime cap. They then vandalise infrastructure such as pumps and cry about used up overtime hours when they have to attend to them.

“How possible is it that they can all use up their overtime hours at the same time?” he said.

Nyambi had gone to ask for a donation of jojo tanks from Malalane Toyota to relieve communities of water shortages before he went on a diatribe on Tuesday evening, excoriating the workers for their selfish and greedy behaviour.

In his Facebook outbursts, Nyambi has previously claimed that it was difficult for many male ANCYL members to be elected to positions because they had to offer sex to other male leaders.

On August 21, he posted: “Leadership of the ANC in Mpumalanga, please stop giving money to comrades who don't assist in branches.  Stop giving money to comrades because they post you every day. These comrades have no impact on branches but they use muthi to get your attention and block valuable comrades who are tirelessly working on branches to have you as our leadership and ensure that the ANC matters to our people.”