Three things got me fascinated recently and laughing all the way through my nationwide travels. Me and my friends have been having abridged conversations about the tender system. You all know the government's flawed procurement system that doesn’t always deliver the best results because the chaps hired to man it are bloody greedy and want a slice of every pie they have to offer to hungry contractors. Now, our conversation was largely about how this system undermines excellence and rewards mediocrity and incompetence. Herewith are three scenarios.ONE: The way the tender system is so corrupt it is most likely that if the South African Blood Service issued an invitation for a qualified company to supply it with 100 litres of blood a month for the next five years you would get comrades winning it and later supplying chicken, goat, sheep and cattle blood to the bank. For all you know people might start dying in droves, all with their blood sucked out.
TWO: if South Africa desperately wanted to win a gold medal at the next Olympics and issued an international invitation to bid from a person who can run on our behalf and win the tender, believe me the tender would go to the obese guy who drives an ML Class, that’s even if confirmed fastest man on earth Usain Bolt bidded. The fat comrade will the be told by his inside connection to go and hire Bolt since he scored high in functionality.
THREE: An initiation school is a very important institution to some of our tribes since it lies at the belly of our very survival. Thus, such a ritual is carried out first; by a trained minder who at times should be the child of someone who has run such a school for generations; second; it should be someone with the right ethnic orientation and blessings from the tribe’s elders, traditional leadership and traditional doctors since they are going to entrust their kids with not only his scalpel but his vision. One of my friends said that if such a service was put to tender you would get tenderers from tribes that don’t even initiate bidding or it, claiming that once they win it they will hire a MoPulana, uMndebele or UmXhosa to run it for them as they will be putting invoices to the House of Traditional Leaders.
What a fucked-up patronage rooted system we have for procurement. No wonder two-thirds of government services, that which is procured sucks. Government should stick to supplying IDs, imagine what would happen if they were supplied by a dodgy company called UMXABULO IDENTITY SOLUTIONS?
