Pretoria - Details of Tshwane’s controversial R15 million tender for takeaway food parcels for staff members working overtime were not available for disclosure to members of the municipal public accounts portfolio committee at a meeting last Friday.
The tender for supply, delivery and off-loading of the takeaways has caused much anger, with opposition parties questioning how such an amount could be spent on food for people who were paid for overtime.
City of Tshwane spokesman Selby Bokaba said it was explained at the meeting that necessary information would be requested from all relevant departments and presented at the next meeting in January.
“The contract was a three-year period tender and ‘an as and when required’ one.
“Therefore the information on total actual expenditure to date, how many people received the items and what type of food parcels these were could not be provided by the supply chain management department at that time,” he said.
The department administered the tenders, and the information required by opposition parties at the meeting had to be sourced from various divisions, Bokaba added.
The city was not in a position to provide certain information to committee members last Friday as it was not anticipated that questions on the tender would be asked, he explained. “All information and related documents will be presented at the next meeting.
“We would like to invite the opposition parties to make it known now if there is other information not disclosed earlier which they will need to avoid further surprises when the committee reconvenes,” said Bokaba.
While the opposition DA - later supported by Cope - stated that the R15m was spent in one month, as reported by the Pretoria News, the city said this was a three-year budget amount, not just for a month.
However, DA councillor and member of the committee Bronwynn Engelbrecht said if the tender was for three years and not only August 2013 as per the report provided to members, then the city was in contravention of the Municipal Finance Management Act by incorrectly reporting on financial statement.
But Bokaba pointed out that taking time to go and collate information from other departments could not be described as a contravention. “This was food for our hardworking technicians who leave their families at night, brave the rain, cold winter and labour thanklessly to make sure that the citizens of Tshwane have power in the event of an outage,” he said.
Pretoria News