WIND WALL EXPOSED AS ELABORATE HOAX: MUNICIPALITY WISHES TO CLARIFY THAT IT HAS NEVER OWNED A SPUR MENU
THE HELDERBURGER — SPECIAL INVESTIGATION AND PROFOUND EMBARRASSMENT EDITION In Which Everything Unravels And Nobody Comes Out Of This Entirely Well
The Helderburger can today confirm what several residents suspected and what the municipality spent three weeks vigorously not investigating — the proposed Strand Wind Wall that sparked community petitions a Gordon’s Bay ratepayer revolt two additional lawyers an international dome proposal a four kilometre underwater tunnel concept and at least one man who has been monitoring parking questions since October was never real.
It was a hoax.
A carefully constructed methodically executed and frankly impressive hoax perpetrated by a single disgruntled municipal employee who has been identified and suspended and whose name this publication is legally advised not to print but whose initials are known to approximately everyone in the Helderberg because the Helderberg is not a large place and people talk and the Gordon’s Bay Community WhatsApp group had the full name with a photograph and a comment section by Tuesday morning.
The municipality has requested that the Helderburger refer to the individual only as The Employee. We will honour this request. The Employee will know who they are. So will everyone else. This is simply how things work in a town where the same forty people attend every public meeting and three of them are related to the municipal receptionist.
HOW IT BEGAN AND HOW LONG NOBODY NOTICED
The Employee joined the Strand municipal administration fourteen months ago in a mid-level administrative capacity that gave them access to official letterhead the municipal email system the council scheduling platform and the catering account which is relevant because the Spur menu on which the original wind wall proposal was allegedly sketched by Councillor van der Merwe was not from the Spur near the municipal offices.
It was from the Spur in Somerset West.
Councillor van der Merwe has never been to the Spur in Somerset West. He has a longstanding preference for the Spur near the municipal offices which he visits on Fridays and always orders the same thing and has done so since 2016. This discrepancy was identified by the municipality’s internal audit team three weeks after the original story broke and was described in their preliminary report as “a significant inconsistency suggesting document fabrication” and described by the councillor himself as “I told you I did not draw anything on a menu I have been saying this since the beginning and nobody listened.”
He has a point. He said it at the time. The Helderburger reported that he said it. We then continued reporting the story. We regret this partially though the story was very good while it lasted.
The original wind wall proposal document including the preliminary budget the engineering notes and the phrase “maybe some nice tiles on it for tourism purposes” were all generated by The Employee using the municipality’s own document templates official fonts and a forged signature that the councillor’s actual signature does not resemble in any meaningful way but which nobody checked because it arrived via the official municipal email system and people tend to assume that official municipal email systems contain official municipal things.
This assumption has now been revised.
THE MECHANICS OF THE DECEPTION
The internal investigation which was conducted by a combination of the municipality’s own audit team and an external forensic consultant brought in from Cape Town has established the following timeline which the Helderburger prints with the municipality’s permission and a certain reluctant admiration for the operational detail involved.
The Employee planted the original wind wall document in the council agenda system six weeks before the meeting at which Councillor van der Merwe allegedly unveiled it. The document was formatted to appear as though it had been submitted through the standard proposal process. The standard proposal process as it turns out does not have a verification step. It now does. This is a change that has been implemented with what the municipal manager described as “some urgency.”
The Employee attended the council meeting in their administrative capacity seated at the back of the room and watched Councillor van der Merwe open the agenda item and read the wind wall proposal aloud for the first time with the expression of a man encountering it for the first time which he was because he was and which several councillors took as evidence of his commitment to the bit rather than evidence that he had no idea what was happening.
When the council voted unanimously in favour of proceeding with the concept they were voting on a document none of them had written and at least one of them had never seen before that moment. The unanimous vote is now described by the municipal manager as “an unfortunate demonstration of institutional momentum” and described by Councillor van der Merwe as “a complete disaster and I want that noted in the minutes.”
It has been noted in the minutes.
THE EMPLOYEE’S MOTIVATION
The investigation has established that The Employee had accumulated a series of workplace grievances over the preceding eight months including a disputed performance review an unsuccessful application for a senior position that went to an external candidate and what The Employee described in a written statement to the disciplinary committee as “a pattern of being ignored in meetings which given that my job title includes the word coordinator is professionally ironic.”
The wind wall was not The Employee’s first act of administrative creativity. The investigation has uncovered two earlier incidents that were not identified at the time as suspicious.
The first was an agenda item at a sub-committee meeting in March proposing the renaming of a beachfront parking area to the “Helderberg Coastal Mobility Hub” which passed without discussion and which The Employee had inserted to see if anyone was reading the agenda. Nobody was. The parking area is still technically named the Helderberg Coastal Mobility Hub in the municipal records. Changing it back requires a motion. The motion has been drafted. It will be heard at the next meeting.
The second was a memo circulated internally proposing a mandatory wind awareness training programme for all beachfront municipal staff which three department heads responded to with questions about scheduling and budget before someone noticed it had not come from HR and quietly buried it. The memo is still technically in the system. The training programme does not exist. Nobody has been trained. This is consistent with several other training programmes in the municipal records but that is a separate matter.
The wind wall however was the masterwork. The Employee has not denied this characterisation. In their written statement they described the wind wall proposal as “a test of whether anyone in this institution reads anything they are asked to approve” and noted that the answer had been “informative.”
COUNCILLOR VAN DER MERWE SPEAKS
Councillor van der Merwe granted the Helderburger an interview on Wednesday afternoon at the Spur near the municipal offices where he ordered his usual and spoke for forty minutes with the focused energy of a man who has been blamed for something for three months and has finally been exonerated and is not going to waste the moment.
He said he had known from the beginning that the wind wall was not his idea and that the Spur menu attribution had troubled him deeply because he had a system for keeping his Spur menus and the Somerset West branch was not part of his rotation.
He said the unanimous council vote was understandable in context because the wind wall had come through official channels and was formatted correctly and contained the right section headings and in fourteen years of council service he had learned that documents with the right section headings tended to move through meetings without significant friction and he was now reviewing whether this was how things should work and had reached the preliminary conclusion that it was not.
He said he bore no personal animosity toward The Employee and understood that workplace frustration was real and that the performance review system had room for improvement and that being ignored in meetings was genuinely demoralising and that he wished The Employee had raised these concerns through the appropriate channels rather than inserting fictional infrastructure projects into the council agenda.
He was asked whether he felt the whole affair had at least raised legitimate questions about community communication and municipal responsiveness.
He said yes and also that he had never been to the Somerset West Spur and wanted that on record.
It is on record.
THE COMMUNITY PROCESSES THE NEWS
Public reaction to the hoax revelation has passed through several distinct phases in the space of a single week in a pattern that local therapist and Helderburger reader Dr Anri Benade described when contacted for comment as “textbook collective processing of institutional betrayal mixed with the specific embarrassment of having been very loud about something that was not true.”
The first phase was disbelief. A significant portion of the community spent the first twenty-four hours after the announcement refusing to accept that the wind wall had never been real on the grounds that they had signed a petition about it and attended a public meeting about it and in at least one case ordered fourteen cases of tinned goods in preparation for what they described as “whatever comes after the wind wall falls through.”
The second phase was anger directed variously at The Employee for the deception at the municipality for not detecting it at the council for voting unanimously for something nobody had written and at the Helderburger for reporting it which we feel is somewhat unfair as we reported what was presented to us as an official municipal proposal through official channels and we would like to note in our own defence that the document had the right section headings.
The third phase was reluctant amusement which set in around day three and which the Gordon’s Bay WhatsApp group expressed through a series of memes that the Helderburger has chosen not to reproduce but which were circulated to us and which we will say only were quite good.
The fourth phase which the community is currently in is a complicated mixture of ongoing embarrassment and genuine relief among those who had opposed the wall and genuine disappointment among those who had supported it and a specific category of feeling among the people who had spoken at public meetings with great passion about their garden furniture and their missing trampolines who are now processing the fact that they did all of that in response to a document created by someone with access to official letterhead and a grievance about their performance review.
SELECTED COMMUNITY RESPONSES
Charmaine Hendricks who wrote in about her tablecloth and the stop sign sent a brief email saying she was embarrassed but that her feelings about the wind remained unchanged and that whether or not the wall was real she still wanted one and that perhaps the hoax had at least put the idea into the public consciousness and someone with actual authority could now take it seriously.
The Helderburger notes that this is an admirably optimistic reading of events.
Oom Sakkie whose voice note about the trampoline was transcribed by our intern Pieter called again to leave a follow-up voice note. Pieter has transcribed it as follows. “Hello yes it is Sakkie again. About the wall. I hear it was fake. This is very upsetting. The trampoline is still gone. That part was not fake. The trampoline was real. I just want that to be known. The wall was fake but the trampoline was real. Thank you goodbye.”
Miems Botha the retired schoolteacher said she had taught for thirty-two years and that in her experience when someone went to this much trouble to make a point about institutional inattention the institution should perhaps focus less on the punishment and more on what had been demonstrated and she said this without heat but with the particular clarity of a woman who spent three decades getting teenagers to understand things they did not want to understand and who knows exactly how long a significant pause should be.
Bakkies Kleinhans said he was relieved the wall was fake and was withdrawing his legal representation relative to the wall specifically. His lawyers relative to the dome and tunnel remain engaged. Those are real. Those are still happening. Bakkies wants that noted.
Corné Pietersen said he had eighty-nine questions prepared for Mr Khalid’s representative and that none of them were about the wall so the hoax did not affect his question list and he would be continuing.
Gary who still has not provided a surname and who asked who was cleaning the wall said he accepted the wall was not real and that this answered the cleaning question by default but that he remained concerned about the dome and the tunnel from a maintenance perspective and reiterated his request for a specific name of a specific person responsible for cleaning and said that just because one infrastructure project was fake did not mean the cleaning concerns about the real ones were not valid.
Gary is correct. The cleaning concerns about the real ones remain valid.
THE DISCIPLINARY PROCESS
The Employee has been suspended on full pay pending a formal disciplinary hearing which the municipality has scheduled and which the Helderburger is not able to report on in detail for legal reasons but which we understand will address charges including misuse of official systems falsification of official documents impersonation of a councillor through forged signature and what the charge sheet apparently describes as “conduct likely to bring the municipality into disrepute” which the municipality’s own communications officer privately acknowledged to this reporter was a charge that required a certain confidence to lay given the circumstances.
The Employee has legal representation. The Employee’s legal representative has made no public statement. The Employee has made no public statement beyond the written submission to the disciplinary committee which the Helderburger has not seen in full but which multiple sources describe as thorough detailed and in places uncomfortably accurate about the state of the municipality’s document verification processes.
The municipal manager has confirmed that regardless of the outcome of the disciplinary process a full review of agenda management document authentication and proposal verification systems will be conducted and completed before the end of the financial year. The review will be conducted by an external party. The external party has been briefed. The external party has asked for the document templates. The document templates have been provided.
The performance review system is also under review. This was not announced as part of the wind wall fallout but the timing is what it is.
WHAT THE HELDERBURGER WISHES TO SAY DIRECTLY
This newspaper reported the wind wall story in good faith based on documentation that appeared official because it was produced using official systems by a person with official access. We asked the questions a community newspaper should ask. We reported the responses we received. We covered the public meetings the petitions the expert opinions and the community debate that followed.
We are not embarrassed by any of that. We are a newspaper. We reported news. The news was fabricated but it was fabricated convincingly using the municipality’s own infrastructure and we are not certain how we were supposed to detect that without access to Councillor van der Merwe’s Spur attendance records which were not previously considered a journalistic resource.
We do however wish to acknowledge the following.
The community of Strand and Gordon’s Bay engaged with this story with genuine passion because the issues it touched on were genuine. The wind is real. The frustration with it is real. The desire for better infrastructure and more responsive municipal governance is real. The missing trampolines are real. The feeling of not being heard in meetings — whether you are a resident or apparently a mid-level municipal coordinator — is real.
A fake proposal generated a real conversation and some of that conversation was worth having regardless of what started it.
We stand by our coverage. We regret the origin of the story. We do not entirely regret the story.
The southeaster is currently in day nine. It is blowing at eighty-eight kilometres per hour. It does not know or care that the wall was a hoax. It is continuing regardless.
That seems about right.
A FINAL NOTE
The Helderburger has replaced the front door sign that blew away in the southeaster incident of three weeks ago. The new sign is bolted directly into the brickwork. This was Pieter our intern’s idea. Pieter has had a very educational few months. We are keeping him.
The Helderburger — Reporting What Happens — Even When What Happens Is This — Since Before It Got This Complicated.
Correction: A previous edition referred to the municipal proposal as having been drawn on the back of a Spur menu. It was not. No Spur menu was involved. We apologise to the Spur corporation for any reputational impact and note that the Spur near the municipal offices remains an establishment of good standing in the Helderberg community and the councillor’s order has not changed.