| Sleaze sludge cakes rain down - 2010/07/16 | |
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News Article: 5859 has been read 290 times. |
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| The country's public tender system is bleeding at every extremity. So-called "tenderpreneurs" are one of the main forces of evil pushing South Africa into ruination, as any casual walk into the public domain shows. Pam Yako, director general (DG) of the water affairs ministry, was placed on (fully paid, naturally), special leave by her minister, Buyelwa Patience Sonjica, on July 21 2009. This week the auditor-general released a raft of findings, not least that water affairs awarded an IT contract worth R180m that was extended "on numerous occasions" to 49 months. The AG's report found that the final contract value tallied at an astonishing R1.1bn. One question: who (or what; perhaps Darth Vader?) was on the other side of this mountain of cash? Amid the horrors, it was established that payment was made to another service provider, even before a contract had been signed, and that "the service provider and the DG (director-general) were co-directors of two entities". If this was not ugly enough, consider that water affairs is supposedly overseeing the vicious disaster of a R70bn backlog in the maintenance and building of new water infrastructure. Let's not also get into the pending collapse of sewage farms, of which only about 10% in the country was a whole can be graded as fully functional. In a brave article in Business Day, published on Thursday, it was suggested that communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda was about to suspend “his” director-general, Mamodupi Mohlala, following persistent disagreements over tenders she refused to sign, due (according to an unnamed source) to the presence of companies linked to people close to Nyanda and a private company, General Nyanda Security (GNS). Nyanda has vociferously denied the allegations. A few weeks ago, Siyabonga Gama, suspended CEO of Transnet Freight Rail, was sacked; among other strange things, he was found to have irregularly awarded a R19m contract to a firm linked to Nyanda. Like Topsy, this apparently escalated to R55m. A few months ago, Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary at Cosatu, the congress of SA trade unions, found himself in hot water after asking why president Jacob Zuma was not investigating allegations against Nyanda. No doubt by now, anyone with an interest in the country's finances would know about the $4.8bn (R30bn at the time) arms deal, signed off in 1999. More than 10 000 articles have been written about something that quickly transformed into a poisoned well, launching a rot that has smothered the country ever since. The arms deal has never been fully or properly investigated, despite overwhelming evidence of corruption. In place of developing and implementing a system to govern transparency in tender awards, the ANC, the ruling party since 1994, has overseen the tender system ballooning into one of the most corrupt systems of any kind in the world. Even Mexico's drug cartels look mild by comparison. Despite the tens of billions of rands that leak from tenders into corrupt pockets each year, there has been no high profile prosecution. The judgement in the recent case against Jacob Sello Selebi, the erstwhile national police commissioner, mentioned little about tenders, mainly because scant evidence on such matters was presented. Selebi was convicted on corruption charges unrelated to his activity in and around the award of certain tenders. There's too much that doesn't add up. On the one hand, Sars, the tax authority, arguably rank as the most efficient government department, no doubt because it is licensed to take chunks of people's hard-earned cash. On the other hand, billions of rands worth of taxpayer cash is looted by tenderpreneurs, with no consequences. Yet buy a car for cash, even a small one, like a friend recently did, and Sars will call (the customer) within hours to check the transaction out. It seems that looting taxpayer cash carries some kind of heavy immunity. South Africa's Public Protector is investigating hundreds of millions of rands of tenders awarded to the innocuously-named SGL Engineering Projects, which has been connected, directly and indirectly, to Julius Malema, who professes to be president of the ANC Youth League. A decade after the arms deal was signed, more than ten municipalities are involved. The Public Protector is also investigating a R67.8m tender awarded to GNS Risk Advisory (now Abalozi), in which Nyanda has a 50% stake. |
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| Source: Moneyweb | Date: 2010/07/16 |
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