Absolutely no evidence could be found this week of the large number of official documents from the Makhado Municipality’s licensing department that were dumped at the municipal dumping site a fortnight ago.

Residents making use of the dumping site on Friday, October 23, came upon a large number of temporary driver’s licences at the site. The newspaper was informed of this and a photo was taken of the documents. Most of the documents had the words “cancelled” written over them. Nonetheless, the find upset many as the documents contained the names and photos of residents, along with their ID-numbers and addresses. The main concern was that fraudsters could easily use this information to produce other counterfeit documents.

When asked to respond to the incident, municipal spokesperson Mr Louis Bobodi said last Wednesday that he would investigate the matter. In the meantime, a picture of the documents appeared on page 3 of last week’s Zoutpansberger.

On Monday this week, Bobodi replied by saying that they could not find any evidence of the documents at the dumping site. The Zoutpansberger then offered to accompany Bobodi to the dumping site to show exactly were the documents had been found, but lo en behold, when the site was visited on Tuesday, the specific area had been cleared by bull-dozer. Absolutely no trace of any of the documents, not even a single one, could be found.

Accompanying the Zoutpansberger and Bobodi was the municipality’s assistant manager for traffic and licensing, Mr Bernard Mokiri. Although no evidence could be found that the documents had ever been there, the Zoutpansberger fortunately still had the photos taken on October 30.

Mokiri asked for copies of the photos and said that he would investigate the matter further. It was made clear that such documents should never have ended up at the dumping site. Mokiri explained that the documents were the property of the Department of Transport, with the municipality merely handling the administration. The municipality is compelled to safeguard these documents for a number of years, after which they must get consent from the Department of Transport to destroy them. The documents are then scanned for back-up purposes, after which they are put through a shredder.

At this stage, it would seem that somebody realized they had made a mistake by dumping the documents at the dumping site and decided to rectify the problem by getting rid of the evidence.