In the end, the legal aid company remained with only 1, 000 subscribers from the union after the rest demanded their money back, it has been confirmed.
BGWU secretary general Phillip Kaboda has characterised the episode as a "misunderstanding", a "mistake" and an "accident". He told Mmegi this week that there was some misunderstanding that had to be rectified: "Indeed people's money was deducted without their consent. When we investigated, we found that the deductions were made by some junior staffers of the legal aid company. "We sat down with the company. Eventually, they refunded all those who were affected by the mistake, it was purely accidental." Kaboda says the legal aid company had asked for a database of the union's membership in order to determine how many of them were their subscribers.
"Instead of deducting only from their subscribers, the company deducted from everyone whose name appeared in the data," he says. "That is what created the problem. They were supposed to go and sell themselves to the other people as potential clients and get their approval. Happily, that problem is now water under the bridge."
