Creditors had to be paid

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PLEASE let me clarify one point of the article, "Bhisho funding bungle sees child feeding scheme axed" (September 10).

It said the Emmanuel Advice Care Centre (EACC) had spent funds "without approval from the department". That's true, but let's talk about the reasons for this!

EACC received the payment of the first tranche of last year's budget with a delay of five months. It had debts owing to its suppliers due to this delay in payment.

If you want to spend money, the project manager has to apply. Then five people at the Department of Social Development have to check this application and sign it.

But you never can address all these people at the same time. For this it often takes several weeks to get the okay to spend the money.

EACC used this money to pay its debts and kept all the receipts. While these expenses were not officially signed off by social development, these moneys were spent on expenses pertaining to the general running of EACC.

For this reason we thought there should be no problem in having it authorised afterwards. This would not have happened if these expenses had been paid on an urgent basis.

Even Bhisho told the district that this was no reason not to pay the second tranche. It even gave the district a due date to transfer the money. Anyway this transfer never happened.