Company shrugs off short notice and rushes to organise lekgotla
JOHANNESBURG: Public Works left the organisation of the annual Cabinet Lekgotla so late that teams had to work through the weekend to get the venue ready.
The lekgotla started yesterday morning. Although it’s at the presidential guest house in Bryntirion in Pretoria, the Department of Public Works wanted marquees, more than 100 tables and table cloths, dozens of chairs, 1 000 napkins, a sound system, flat panel monitors, air-conditioning, VIP toilets and flowers – a six-page list of infrastructure requirements.
The job also included a back-up generator in case the area had load shedding.
While the department called for bids for the infrastructure job in early May, with a closing date at the end of that month, the tender was awarded only on Thursday and the contractor, Crocia Events, arrived at the site on Friday to start work.
A businessman from Crocia Events, who didn’t want to be named, wasn’t surprised by the late tender award, but said the company was able to get the job done on time, and handed over the early site to Public Works officials.
“The general trend in government is a weakness of not appointing service providers on time,” he said.
“I wasn’t shocked, but we had to work 24/7.”
Crocia pulled in its full team of 53 people and worked through the weekend, finishing the job three hours ahead of schedule.
“As much as it was short notice – we would have wanted maybe an extra day or so – it was highly doable and that’s why we accepted the job.”
Getting jobs like that done at the last minute means paying employees overtime, which is usually not included in the bids, so businesses may lose money as they can’t change the contract price when it’s finally offered.
“Because you are hungry, you still do it,” said the businessman.
Public Works had publicly listed the cost of the job as R2.657 million, but then told the Cape Times’s sister newspaper The Star that Crocia’s infrastructure contract was stipulated at R1.06m, which Crocia confirmed.
Public Works spokesman Thami Mchunu said the R2.657m price was a mistake, incorrectly loaded on the department’s website by an official.
Mchunu previously said the average cost of the Cabinet lekgotla was R1.1m.
By late yesterday, Mchunu couldn’t explain the late awarding of the tender, saying officials had not yet given him an explanation.