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Durban – The police and defence departments have admitted that their monitoring of contracts and service agreements is not effective, economical or efficient. An auditor-general’s report revealed they had spent billions hiring consultants for work their officials should have done.
The Department of Defence spent R10.4 billion on consultants between 2008 and 2011. The police department spent just over R4bn in that period.
The auditor-general’s report, released last month, also revealed the defence department had paid R860 million over three years to aircraft specialists from aviation company Aero Manpower Group – a business unit of Denel Aviation. The open-ended contract, which is set to be terminated in April, following the report, dates from 1986.
It also came to light that the police’s intended spending of R80m on fixing 200 armoured Nyalas in preparation for the 2010 soccer World Cup had ended up costing more than double, R177m, with 44 Nyalas delivered late – long after the tournament had ended.
Appearing before Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) on Tuesday, the two departments came under fire from MPs, who forced them to admit that their monitoring systems were weak and that consultants were at times used unnecessarily.
An agitated ANC MP, Roy Ainslie, questioned Secretary of Defence Sam Gulube on why his department had never revisited the 27-year “evergreen contract” with Denel, 18 years into democracy, to ensure that skills of the aircraft maintenance technicians were transferred to the department and made permanent.
File photo by Matlhodi Madibana.
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Gulube responded that the department was in the process of terminating the contract.
According to the auditor-general’s report, the department lacked internal capacity and skills.
Gulube told Scopa the technicians had such specialised skills that it would be too expensive for the department to retain them as they were “highly sought after” by commercial airlines all over the world.
But Gulube’s response angered Ainslie, who lambasted the department for failing to do a cost benefit analysis as required by law to check whether outsourcing services was cost effective.
“How do you know how much the cost is going to be? The AG says in each report that you haven’t done cost benefit analysis in terms of supply management, service delivery… throughout this report you haven’t done this exercise. So you can’t sit there and tell us that it’s too expensive… you don’t know,” he said.
The department also came under fire for R134m paid to consultants without supporting documentation. The person responsible for monitoring the contract had been suspended and the vacant post had not been filled.
Political Bureau
