Sowetan reports that the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs is embroiled in a court battle over alleged procurement irregularities in one of the country’s largest and most successful employment programmes.
Affidavits suggest that the department may have flouted its procurement processes to appoint 11 implementing agents to manage its Community Work Programme – a national employment project with a R12-billion budget.
At stake is the future of 250 000 workers employed through the programme.
It is a state-funded initiative designed to cushion the poor by providing regular lowskilled work opportunities like road maintenance, home and community-based care work, planting trees and maintaining food gardens, and fixing classrooms.
Participants are managed nationally by implementing agents, normally NGOs, which control a chunk of the programme’s budget, which was rolled out in 2008.
It continued largely unnoticed and scandal-free until April when Seriti Institute – the most experienced implementing agent contracted by the department since the inception of the programme – lodged an urgent application in the high court.
Citing noncompliance with various procurement regulations, Seriti – whose bid for the new three-year contract was declined from the start – approached the Pretoria High Court to set the department’s decision aside and review the entire procurement process.
But it is in Seriti’s supplementary founding affidavit, after it inspected the department’s record of decision for the successful appointments, that “extensive material irregularities” are revealed.
According to the findings of a verification committee set up by the department, there were red flags that emerged at the outset from within NGOs that were eventually appointed as implementing agents on the programme.
One of them, Out the Box Foundation, is “a small organisation based in Bela-Bela that appears to be struggling to stay afloat”.
The report states: “Of particular concern is the location and state of their offices. The said office is a backroom (outside) in a private home… There is an evident capacity challenge as there are only four people officially contracted, and the rest consists of volunteers.”
The committee found that another successful bidder, Icembe Foundation, did not have any experience in government work or an existing governance structure.
“They do not have a board of trustees/directors to effect governance oversight to their operations,” the report states.
Seriti also alleges that another successful applicant, Beulah Africa Development, which partnered with another company for the tender, was not included in the list of pre-qualified bidders and that the bids of eight NGOs eventually appointed as implementing agents were found to be noncompliant and had been disqualified by a pre-qualification committee at the outset.
Seriti CEO Juanita Pardesi said it was one of two bodies that piloted the scheme in 2008 and has been an implementing agent until March.
“The Seriti board feels strongly that we need to bring to light the irregular process followed in awarding the tenders to manage the implementation of a public employment programme, which has a budget of over R12-billion over the current MTEF,” she said.
Departmental spokesperson Legadima Leso said the department would not comment as the matter was still in court.
The original of this report by Amil Umraw appeared on page 9 of Sowetan of 10 September 2018
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