Cape Town - The spy satellite being built by a Russian company for South Africa is definitely in progress, it has emerged, despite rising costs to the defence intelligence special account, including R212.7 million in fruitless and wasteful expenditure over the past four years.
DA MP and defence spokesman David Maynier promised on Sunday to ask pertinent questions about the R1-billion-plus project during the questions to peace and security cluster ministers in the National Assembly on November 5
“The public, who may have sunk up to R1.4bn into the defence intelligence’s bungled Russian Kondor-E spy satellite project, have a right to know,” he said, adding that Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula had to date declined to be drawn on this matter.
The on-off-on-again secret satellite project was thought to have been scrapped after a bungled procurement contract. But last week Secretary of Defence Sam Gulube told the parliamentary defence committee on which Maynier serves that the contract to develop “a military satellite” had been reinstated and was on track.
This public confirmation, Maynier said, was “a major breakthrough” and came when Gulube referred to a line item in the special defence account annual financial statements for fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
“In the meeting, Dr Sam Gulube claimed that the fruitless and wasteful expenditure was incurred as a result of exchange rate fluctuations…
“However, it is highly likely given the large amount of fruitless and wasteful expenditure which ranges between R2 314 000 and R110 414 000 a year, that the contract for the military satellite was reinstated at a higher contract price,” Maynier argued.
Project Flute goes back to May 2006, when South Africa signed a secret contract with a Russian company, NPO Mashinostroyenia, to build a Kondor-E satellite for South Africa’s defence intelligence. Subsequently, the contract for the radar imaging satellite was renamed “Project Consolidated Flute”.
Initially scheduled to be launched into space on February 27 this year, according to a report by Russia’s Interfax-AVN, which identified the launch site as Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the dates have repeatedly been postponed. In early July, the Kondor-E launch date was delayed to the northern hemisphere’s autumn, and after an expected September 30, a new mid-October date was set, and then delayed to December 18, according other reports.
It is understood that one of the procurement flaws was that defence intelligence would not have had control over the satellite from South Africa. However, the statement of work, which refers to an unnamed “general client”, is between NPO Mashinostroyenia and a company called KB Svet Komputers, which was required to establish a virtual private network so that data from the satellite could be transmitted.
Maynier said that while the statement’s contract number and contract date are the same as for Project Flute, without the “general client” being expressly named, it was “only possible to reach the tentative conclusion that a ground station may be, or may have been, established in South Africa”.
Political Bureau