Questions over Kekana role in tender switch
Deputy minister said to have given ‘advice’ on replacement firm
● Deputy communications minister Pinky Kekana’s name has been dragged into a dispute over a R300m IT tender.
Micro Focus, a multinational company that provides software licences and consulting services to the State Information Technology Agency (Sita), has told the agency that Kekana advised it which local company to appoint as its local partner.
Micro Focus, which has headquarters in the UK and the US, appointed the new partner, X Telecoms, after prematurely ending its relationship with another local company, Afrocentric, in July without providing any reasons.
Insiders in the department of communications are now asking why the contract was taken away from Afrocentric and what Kekana’s motives were in recommending X Telecoms.
Afrocentric Projects and Services was appointed in November last year as one of the fulfilment agents for the framework agreement between Micro Focus and Sita, which is estimated to be worth $25m (about R364m).
However, Afrocentric’s two-year contract was terminated “without cause” eight months later.
After the contract was cancelled, Micro Focus said it had asked Kekana for guidance on which company should replace Afrocentric.
In a letter from Micro Focus to Sita communicating Afrocentric’s termination, which the Sunday Times has seen, the company said “we have been in contact with the deputy minister of telecommunications [sic] in order to provide guidance in the sourcing and procuring of a suitable, additional SMME [small, medium and micro enterprise] fulfilment agent”.
Late last month, Kekana was a speaker at a Micro Focus conference. It is not clear in what capacity she was addressing the event.
Neither Kekana nor Micro Focus responded to questions sent two weeks ago by e-mail, or to follow-up calls and WhatsApp messages.
The Sunday Times understands that Micro Focus forwarded the name of X Telecoms, owned by Johannesburg business person Khethi Nkosi, as Afrocentric’s preferred replacement.
Nkosi confirmed his company had been approached by Micro Focus but denied that Kekana had anything to do with it.
Sita’s spokesperson, Caroline Smith, told the Sunday Times the agency did not know why Afrocentric’s contract had been cancelled.
“Micro Focus informed Sita on July 11 2019 that they had taken the decision to terminate the contract with Afrocentric. No reasons were provided for the termination,” Smith said.
Afrocentric’s owner, Luvo Gwiliza, has asked Sita and communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams to intervene, but Nkosi said there was nothing untoward about his company’s appointment by Micro
Focus. “I started the process with Micro Focus long ago and I have worked with these people before,” he said. “As for the allegations that I was imposed by the deputy minister, where does she know me from? I have had a relationship with Micro Focus for years,” Nkosi said. “They have requested me to come on board and they said, ‘Khethi, we want to proceed with you as we had initially intended’, and I only heard in the air that they were having conflict with Luvo.
“Engagements with Micro Focus started before the deputy minister was appointed to her position [in February 2018], so how can she impose me when I started this before she was appointed?”
In a letter to Sita and Ndabeni-Abrahams that the Sunday Times has seen, Gwiliza questioned the legality of the regulations governing Sita’s framework agreements, including the one with Micro Focus.
Gwiliza wrote that Micro Focus was not supposed to appoint fulfilment agents because this was Sita’s prerogative.
“The way these Sita framework agreements are structured and regulated is fundamentally flawed and possibly unlawful, as Sita relinquishes their procurement mandate to a private company,” Gwiliza said in the letter. “We urge your intervention in this matter as a small, black-owned business, [because] we have already invested and will experience excessive financial losses together with job losses.”