Industrial court judge, Tebogo Maruping, on Thursday ordered twenty former Gaborone City Council temporal security guards, who are demanding an undisclosed amount of money from the Council in form of overtime, unlawful tax deductions and leave payments from the Council, to bring concrete documentary proof for their claims .
This followed after their colleague, Don Setlhare, who appeared on their behalf, failed to produce a single document before the Court to prove the claims.
When asked to produce such proof, all he said was that he did not have the documents.
“We do not have such documents with us,” he repeatedly told the judge.
Setlhare said that their former employer, the GCC, did not give them the required documents from which they could calculate what was owed to them.
“The authorities at GCC have refused to give us the documents the Court wants. The same applies to the personnel at the Ministry of Local Government,” he explained.
Besides leave and overtime payments, Setlhare told the Court that they have also learnt from Ministry of Local Government authorities that their wages had been wrongly taxed and that they also demanded to be refunded what they were taxed.
Issuing the order that they should go back and reorganize themselves, Maruping said that they had simply come to Court unprepared.
“You have not prepared yourself adequately you just have to go back and do that within the next 14 days,” he ordered.
Maruping had just chastised the GCC for failing to comply with a Court order by sending an employee who was no longer working at the GCC to appear on their behalf. This, he said, was a sign of gross incompetence by GCC.
The judge also said that he wondered why the Council has not sent one of its lawyers to handle the matter as that was a legal matter. As they stepped out of the Court, they immediately started reorganizing themselves. They were overheard vowing that they would fight the case to the bitter end and would not allow the GCC to cheat them. The former GCC employees were apparently employed at the time the Council was saying that it did not have resources to employ full time security companies to guard their premises in Gaborone.
