Cesa slams lack of skills in tender committees

The government has been blamed for allowing collusive tendering and bid-rigging in the construction sector by permitting the appointment of officials without the appropriate skills to key positions to identify these corrupt practices. Lefadi Makibinyane, the newly appointed chief executive of Consulting Engineers South Africa (Cesa), yesterday blamed the collusive tendering on the exclusion from the tender adjudication process of consulting engineers who had designed projects. Makibinyane said it was easy to blame the construction industry for the collusion without government introspection on what it had done to encourage the collusion. “It takes two to tango. These types of things can never happen in isolation,” he said.

Makibinyane’s comments follow 15 construction firms, including seven listed companies, concluding settlements with the Competition Commission and agreeing to pay penalties collectively totalling R1.46 billion for bid-rigging and collusive tendering. These corrupt activities involved 300 projects valued at R47bn, of which R28bn related to public sector projects and R19bn to private sector projects. Mac Maharaj, the spokesman in the Presidency on behalf of President Jacob Zuma, who heads up the presidential infrastructure co-ordinating commission, was not available for comment. Makibinyane said the type of people that the government appointed must be blamed for allowing the collusion and they should be asked how corruption on this scale could happen on their watch. They were the gatekeepers but if they could not really identify these things before they happened, it meant they were “part and parcel of it”, he said.

Graham Pirie, Cesa’s former chief executive, added that the contract mechanism might also have been responsible for the corrupt activities because infrastructure had to be delivered very rapidly with shortened lead times and the contract mechanism was invariably turnkey or engineering, procurement and construction type contracts. “It was a package deal and the interaction was between the client and contractor, which became a one-stop shop, which may have caused some of the issues,” he said. Wally Mayne, the contractual affairs manager at Cesa, said public sector clients had lost sight of the value of consulting engineers as an independent trusted advisor who could help the client in the tender process and to evaluate those tenders.

Makibinyane said there was a need for public procurement to “go back to basics” and questioned how it was possible to have a bid specification committee or bid adjudication committee without the necessary skills and not constituted of professional engineers. Makibinyane said 20 years into democracy there were many black people who were competent but were “shunned because they are prudent in what they do and are not wanted”. Pirie said that the country’s procurement legislation was generally sound and required transparency, but was just not applied. He said Cesa was at one stage handling up to 50 complaints a month about irregular and non-transparent tenders or the flouting of the procurement process. Pirie said Cesa, where it had been notified of these tenders, had challenged them but it was now “calming down a bit”.