Gijima, Sita battle heads to ConCourt

THE State Information Technology Agency (Sita) is embroiled in a bitter legal battle with top businessman Robert Gumede’s company Gijima Holdings over a bungled multimillion-rand tender.

In January 2012, Sita cancelled a multi-year contract with Gijima to provide IT services to the SA Police Service and this resulted in Gumede’s company incurring about R20-million in lost revenue.

Gijima then approached the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria to protect its rights under the police contract.

The parties later reached an outof-court settlement and Gijima was offered another contract with the Department of Defence without Sita advertising it.

According to the terms of the agreement, Gijima would forsake its R20-million damages claim. In exchange, Sita would appoint Gijima as the defence department’s hardware maintenance and support service provider.

After this agreement, Gijima says, it sought assurances from Sita that its appointment was lawful and complied with its procurement requirements.

And Sita bosses told Gijima representatives that the agency would seek a deviation from the normal procurement processes and that they had the power to authorise the agreement up to an amount of R50million, according to papers filed at the Constitutional Court.

A year into the defence department contract, Sita stopped paying Gijima and the company instituted arbitration proceedings to force the state agency to pay R9.5-million.

In its response at the arbitration proceedings, Sita stated that the defence department contract was invalid as it did not comply with section 217 of the constitution.

Gijima said it was the first time Sita was raising the invalidity issue.

The arbitrator ruled that he did not have jurisdiction to entertain a challenge on the basis that the defence department contract breached the constitution.

Sita then approached the high court to review and set aside the defence department contract but its application was dismissed by Judge Keoagile Matojane in May 2015.

Its appeal was also thrown out by the Supreme Court of Appeal in September last year.

Both courts said Sita’s 22 months delay in launching its challenge was unreasonable as the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act makes provision for judicial review to be instituted without unreasonable delay and not later than 180 days.

Sita is now heading to the Constitutional Court to have Gijima’s defence department contract declared invalid and set aside.

The matter will be heard in May.