Public Works to halt new tenders

A six-month moratorium has been placed on all Department of Public Works tenders in an attempt to root out corruption. A ban has also been placed on the department acquiring any new furniture “for some time” and a six-month grace period given to people in possession of state property to come forward to allow the department to help them to get the papers for this in order. Public Works Minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde said on Friday these decisions were taken at a departmental management committee meeting in Pretoria on Thursday. The moratorium follows the controversy of police leases signed by the department for buildings in Pretoria and Durban owned by businessman Roux Shabangu. Mahlangu-Nkabinde said the moratorium meant the department would not issue any new tenders or adjudicate any new tenders for six months but a date had not yet been set for implementation.

“We expect people to call us names but we cannot continue to feed our children in a dirty house. We have to first clean the house. It’s high time we started cleaning it up to give South Africans a better service. “Finance is proposing that anything worth more than R10 million must go through Treasury. They have the capacity to do that and it takes some of the headaches away from us. I’m not against creating millionaires but they must deserve it. There are so many loopholes in the tender system and I’m going to close all these loopholes,” she said. Mahlangu-Nkabinde said the moratorium would not be implemented without due regard for those tenders in the pipeline and would not stop the pipeline. The minister stressed that she did not want to destabilise the property industry and the moratorium could possibly be in place for less than six months. The department was open to discuss deals that were at an advanced stage and if there was a critical need for building related to service delivery this would be considered on its merits. It would also not tamper with work that had already commenced.

Mahlangu-Nkabinde said department money would be spent “in the courts” if she did not implement the moratorium. She did not have an idea how many tenders might be affected by the moratorium. She said the national Public Works office needed to know what was happening in all its offices and currently only got “half stories” from its offices, resulting in a number of court cases each month. Attempts to obtain comment on the plan from the SA Property Owners’ Association were unsuccessful. Mahlangu-Nkabinde added that a lot of state property was not in the hands of the state but stressed she was not saying everyone in possession of this property “is a crook”. If the people in possession of state property had not come forward in the six-month grace period to make sure the property belonged to them, they would then have to “speak to the justice cluster”, she said. Mahlangu-Nkabinde said the decision not to buy any more furniture was taken because the department had “store rooms full of furniture”.

The minister said that when she became Speaker of the National Assembly, she took over the “posh” office of former speaker Baleka Mbete, which had nice furniture. But when she returned from leave, the furniture was gone without anyone consulting her and this was still happening today. She said she now had an opportunity to change this.