Tablets still not recovered from Eastern Cape pupils
The Eastern Cape education department has still not recovered nearly 55,000 e-learning tablets distributed to grade 12 pupils in 2020 under a controversial R538m contract with an Ayo Technology Solutionslinked company, the DA says.
The company that won the contract, Sizwe Africa IT Group, is a subsidiary of Ayo, of which African Equity Empowerment Investments — controlled by businessman Iqbal Survé’s Sekunjalo Investment Holdings — is a shareholder.
The Eastern Cape High Court in Bhisho suspended the contract pending the outcome of a court case to review the contract. The contract, signed in April 2020, was for the lease over three years of 55,000 tablets delivered from June to September to assist students with online education during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Stakeholders criticised the contract, saying it was a waste of money to lease the tablets instead of buying them, which would have been much cheaper. Altogether R405m was paid for tablets and data with a R133.4m more earmarked for virtual classes to be recorded by teachers from specially made studios.
According to DA education spokesperson Yusuf Cassim, the department has threatened students who missed the mid-April cut-off date for the return of the tablets with criminal action if they do not return them. Eastern Cape education spokesperson Mali Mtima was not in a position to confirm or deny any information about the tablets because it relates, he said, to a continuing court case.
“These tablets should have been retrieved from learners in October last year, following the court interdict, when the learners were still at school, but now [the department has] created a mess,” Cassim said.
“When the contract was suspended and the department’s appeal was unsuccessful, the department should have immediately taken action to recall the tablets in line with the court decision. Its failure to act in accordance with the court order is what has got us in this mess. The horse has already bolted. This is in blatant defiance of the court ruling.”
The high court issued the interdict, which was urgently applied for by the government’s IT procurement arm, the State Information Technology Agency (Sita), on the grounds that it was issued irregularly as there was no open tender. By law, Sita should have done the procurement and it argued that the contract was unlawful. The court heard allegations that vast sums of money had been siphoned off from the department to Sizwe. The education department used Treasury regulations to piggyback on an existing IT products and services lease contract between the departments of economic development, environmental affairs, and tourism with Sizwe without putting the contract out to open tender.
The high court interdicted the education department from making any payments against the contract, and the two companies from providing any further services pending the outcome of the court case.
In reply to a question in the provincial legislature by Cassim in February, education MEC Fundile Gade said his department had sent three circulars to schools — in September and December 2020 and in February 2021 — regarding the retrieval of the tablets.
“The department did not issue an instruction to schools to retrieve the tablets from the learners at the time of the interdict being issued as it was a very critical time in the national senior certificate exams preparation process for grade 12 learners, and there were a variety of curriculum support measures that could be accessed without data, which aided grade 12 learners in their preparations,” Gade said.
“All the tablets have, in the interim, been blocked (that is, prior to the start of the academic year) by the service provider to disable them pending the outcome of the court case still in progress.”
ALL THE TABLETS HAVE … BEEN BLOCKED TO DISABLE THEM PENDING THE OUTCOME OF THE COURT CASE