A history of concern over tender

IT is not just the Constitutional Court that says Virginia Petersen’s South African Social Services Agency (Sassa) stuck its head in the sand over “irregularities” in the grant tender.

Corruption Watch, for example, says when it asked Petersen about the anomalies in the tender, she simply ignored it.

As the Constitutional Court ruled this week, Sassa failed to communicate what it had done “to investigate irregularities in the bid and decision-making process”.

Indeed, the judges added that, “contrary to its obligations ... Sassa has adopted an unhelpful and almost obstructionist stance. Its conduct must be deprecated.”

Petersen’s excuse — that she became CEO (her predecessor, incidentally, was fired for corruption) too late to make a difference in this tender — has been roundly trashed by the Black Sash.

The Black Sash says it began raising serious concerns with her in 2011.

On August 18 2011, the Black Sash wrote to Petersen expressing “our concern about the new tender process . . . highlighting the loophole which allows Cash Paymaster Services to advance loans to grant beneficiaries . . . against the provisions of the Social Assistance Act”.

In June 2013, the organisation met Petersen “to discuss the large-scale unprecedented deductions from social grants by money lenders as well as CPS’s practice of selling airtime to grant beneficiaries”.

Sassa undertook to address these concerns but “to date this has not been done”, wrote the Black Sash.

The result is that thousands of the poorest of the poor are having deductions made from their grants before they even get them.

Which begs a somewhat cynical response to Sassa’s loudly proclaimed slogan, “We Care”, as well as to Petersen’s comment that, far from seeing the Constitutional Court judgment as a scathing indictment, “Sassa views this judgment as a very pro-poor judgment”.