Buck stops elsewhere for Sassa
Dodging Blame | By Petersen’s logic, the recent indictment of her agency was really vindication, writes Chris Barron
SELDOM has there been a more scathing indictment of a government organisation’s competence and integrity than that handed to the South African Social Security Agency by the Constitutional Court last week.
In a blistering judgment it confirmed an earlier ruling that Sassa’s award of a R10-billion contract to Net1’s subsidiary Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) to pay welfare grants to 21.6 million beneficiaries was “constitutionally invalid”.
Instead of tendering her resignation, or at the very least hanging her head in shame, Sassa’s CEO Virginia Petersen treated it as some kind of victory because the Constitutional Court had not found the award illegal as well as invalid.
After initially ignoring requests for an interview, the veteran civil servant and social work graduate from the University of the Western Cape and University of Cape Town belatedly — after being advised that Business Times would be running a story with or without her participation — responded to a list of questions.
“Firstly, we need to set the record straight,” she wrote. The Constitutional Court judgment was neither “scathing” nor an “indictment”.
“The losing bidder [Absa subsidiary AllPay] wanted the court to find the tender illegal and invalid. It found the tender to be invalid. Not illegal.”
She is right, up to a point. It was the High Court in Pretoria that ruled in 2012 that the tender was both “illegal and invalid”. But that court refused to set the tender aside — something the Constitutional Court has now effectively done by ordering that the tender process be gone through all over again.
Nowhere in a stream of self-righteous answers to questions from this newspaper does Petersen come even close to acknowledging culpability.
But the Constitutional Court judgment left no doubt of it at all. The court said: “Sassa’s irregular conduct has been the sole cause for the declaration of invalidity and for the set- ting aside of the contract between it and Cash Paymaster.”
What is clear is that Sassa’s “irregular” behaviour has cost taxpayers tens of millions of rands. This is not only the cost of having to repeat the process but also the money that the public might have been saved had Sassa secured a contract with the most competitive and cost-effective tenderer.
AllPay has calculated that had it been awarded the tender instead of CPS, then Sassa would have saved the taxpayer about R926-million over five years — a point that the Constitutional Court judgment is careful to note.
The Constitutional Court first ruled that the tender was invalid in November last year. The Democratic Alliance demanded that Petersen be fired. There has been no sign of this happening.
The losing bidder wanted the court to find the tender illegal and invalid. It found the tender to be invalid. Not illegal
Petersen conceded that “it is the right of all political parties to have an opinion on matters involving public funds”, but made it clear that she would not be offering her resignation any time soon.
This in spite of the Constitutional Court emphasising in its judgment that “organs of state must be accountable”, adding: “That Sassa is an organ of state is clear.”
Petersen said she refused to be held accountable because, by the time she was appointed CEO in May 2011, the tender process had already begun.
However, the tender was still in its infancy at that stage, and already there were serious concerns about irregularities in the process which she evidently ignored.
By the time she arrived, respected advocate Norman Arendse had already claimed that while he was deliberating as part of the adjudication committee on the previous tender, he was approached by Gideon Sam and offered an “open chequebook” bribe to swing the tender in favour of CPS. (That tender was then scrapped, and re-run — but without Arendse at the helm.)
At the same time, President Jacob Zuma’s lawyer Michael Hulley played some mysterious role in “advising” Sassa, according to official documents, though quite what he actually did remains a mystery.
The truth is that Petersen was ensconced as CEO a full month before the bid submission deadline, and in good time to interrogate a crucial last-minute change to the specifications which had the effect of fatally disadvantaging AllPay’s bid, and benefiting CPS.
Petersen hardly emerges as the disinterested civil servant she is required to be in this whole sordid affair.
When AllPay took Sassa to court she accused them of being sore losers.
“It was only when it turned out to have been unsuccessful that [AllPay] cried foul,” she said.
“In all likelihood, [AllPay] would not have won the tender even under a different process,” she said, when asked to comment on the last-minute changes that AllPay complained about.
Given this attitude, it seems a good thing that the Constitutional Court has decided it will monitor the new process and “require” Sassa to report back to it every step of the way. “The public clearly has an interest in ensuring that the tender is re-run properly,” it said.