Survival trumps good sense
IT IS trite to say state tenders are at the core of SA’s corruption and service delivery problems. Procurement contracts awarded by the government have become an important source of political patronage, to the point where a new word has been coined to describe so-called business people who depend on irregular deals to accumulate wealth: tenderpreneurs.
State tenders are also an important — probably the most important — source of funding for the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) election campaigns.
The notorious arms deal was a rich mine of such contracts, as is Eskom’s capacity expansion programme. Transnet’s ambitious infrastructure development project will no doubt be too.
In addition to the ANC benefiting directly from contracts in which its investment arm, Chancellor House, has stakes, it is an open secret that cadres who win tenders are expected to contribute generously to party coffers if they want to keep a skin in the game.
From the perspective of the ANC, the only downside to this mutual back-scratching exercise is that those who win such contracts often fail to deliver, or produce such shoddy work that it has to be redone at further expense. Ordinary people, many of them loyal ANC supporters, are feeling short-changed. Some, such as the parents of pupils at state schools in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, are getting angry. What is to be done? The obvious answer would be to crack down on corruption, insist on genuinely competitive tender evaluations, police tender award procedures more carefully, and monitor delivery to avoid paying for work that is not carried out, or goods that are not delivered. But if you are a communist, that is apparently not so obvious, and one of SA’s leading communists just happens to be the ANC’s secretary-general.
Gwede Mantashe says the solution is to limit the use of tenders by “building state capacity”. In other words, by placing ever more economic activity within the ambit of government control. If the state procures “directly from the manufacturers” and minimises its dependence on “middlemen”, the state’s tender problems and the associated ills will go away, he reckons.
It beggars belief that anyone can believe that taking tenders away from the corrupt and giving them to the incompetent will fix anything, or that the government will be able to procure goods and services in the absence of a tender system and not end up paying inflated prices.
But it is apparent that rational thought is no longer a factor when it comes to ANC policy-making.
The name of the game is political survival.