MBOMBELA – Following the recent tender scandal with the province’s school feeding scheme, the contracts have been readjudicated after losing bidders took the education department to court.
One of the losing bidders spoke to Lowvelder on condition of remaining anonymous, since he is a professional tenderpreneur and earns a living through government contracts. Mr X said it was hard making a living through tenders if one was not connected to the people making the decisions.
In May the High Court judge, Ms Nicoline Janse van Nieuwenhuizen had set aside the awarding of the tender. The department had been given one month to readjudicate the bid by last Thursday. The court had also ordered the premier, Mr David Mabuza, MEC for education, Ms Reginah Mhaule and HOD Ms Mohlasedi Mhlabane to pay the legal costs on an attorney-and-client scale of the losing bidders.
Janse van Nieuwenhuizen had found that some of the winning bidders submitted more than one bid, contravening a resolution adopted by the bid committee to disqualify them. Five failed to prove their registration with the compensations commissioner or were not in good standing at the time of making their bids, and 14 entities submitted theirs after the closing date.
The bid had also required that a letter of good standing from a bank as well as three-year audited reports from the company or owner be attached. Proof of availability of warehousing facilities and appropriate vehicles to deliver the food to the schools were also required as well as evidence of experience in nutrition and food management. The failing of providing any of these was supposed to lead to the bidder scoring zero points for the item. Instead, some of these bidders had been awarded contracts.
Mr X had gone to great lengths to obtain supplier agreements with local producers benefiting women and disabled people as part of the required business plan, but again missed out on obtaining a contract with the readjudication.
Instead, Mathatha General Trading, Mpfumelelo Business Enterprises, Triponza Trading 804 CC, Progclass Trading & Projects and Singita Civil Works and Building Construction had been originally awarded the contracts despite not having business licences with the local council in which the food was to be stored and distributed.
On February 18 Mr Aaron Sekulane, business-licensing officer at Bushbudkridge Local Municipality said, “Based on our office records, I hereby confirm that none of the listed companies have applied or have trading licences with us.”
The bid, which had closed on September 11, 2013 was evaluated on functionality (100 points), price (90 points) and equity ownership (10 points). However, the court had found that Mbetse Ladies and Mabeke Women each had only one director, Ms Ethel Shongwe, the former deputy chairman of the Mpumalanga Provincial Tender Board. She had thus submitted two bids and should have been disqualified in terms of the resolution taken by the bid-evaluation committee. The court found she had formed both companies about one month before bidding closed, causing it to have no experience nor three-year audited financial statements.
“The very purpose of these documents is to demonstrate that the bidder has the financial resources to ensure that food of the highest quality is delivered,” the judge had said. “The bid-evaluation committee should have questioned the integrity of proof of availability of buildings and vehicles because it is highly unlikely that an entity which has been in existence for only one month could obtain the necessary operational capital to put sufficient infrastructure in place to comply with the capacity requirements (an incidence of functionality) of the bid.”
Similarly, she found that Bidders Triponza Trading 804, Daphm Trading, Gugulezwe Lethu Ligistics and Judies Catering Service should have been disqualified because their tendered amounts per unit of food (per meal per pupil per day) was more than 400 per cent higher than the average tender amount of the other respondents.
X spoke of a colleague who didn’t even fill out a bid document unless someone informed him that he would win it in advance. Another time he saw a bid remain open past the deadline in order for the predetermined winner to submit his bid. X cited the fact that the same company would obtain contracts to do varied things in different departments as a sign of cronyism. Some of his colleagues were also routinely supplied with the prices they should quote in order to win contracts.
The judge had found in this case that “the only inference that could be drawn from this was that the bids were not adjudicated by the members individually but done so according to the dictates of another. These discrepancies were indicative of the fact that there had been tampering with the outcome of the tender process”.
As Mr X explained, “I’m not saying that I should win a tender if my prices are not right but they shouldn’t give it to people who don’t even have the required documents.”
