COSATU welcomes Parliament’s Finance Committees’ calling Minister Mboweni and National Treasury to appear before it to account for national scandals engulfing the procurement of PPEs. Minister Mboweni and Treasury will appear before Parliament’s Finance Committees at 3pm, Wednesday 05 August 2020 on a virtual platform.
COSATU has repeatedly raised with government and publicly the massive loopholes in the public procurement of PPEs which has resulted in:
· Industrial-scale looting.
· Supplying shoddy PPEs; and how this is endangering the lives of thousands of public health workers and their families, with some already having, died as a result.
· The loss of potentially billions of Rands to the economy on cheap imports and when every cent in local procurement can save thousands of South African workers’ jobs; and
· Gross wastage of billions of Rands due to overpriced products when the state is robbing public servants of their meagre inflationary increase for 2020.
The government needs to move with speed to halt the rot in the procurement of PPEs and send a message to the public that it is serious about tackling the cancer of corruption. The state must immediately:
· Centralise the public procurement of PPEs for the entire state under National Treasury.
· Only award PPE procurement contracts to local and legally compliant manufacturers.
· Publish the details of all PPE contracts awarded by the state.
· Ban politicians and their immediate families from state tenders.
· Audit all PPE tenders and prosecute those who have broken the law.
· Exercise the full powers of the Auditing Amendment Act to hold offending politicians and officials personally financially liable for corruption and wasteful expenditure under their watch.
· Remove political officer bearers whose departments are implicated in corruption and wasteful expenditure;
· Establish rapid response courts to tackle corruption (as done during the 2010 Soccer World Cup).
· Finalise and fastrack the passage of the Public Procurement Bill; and
· Compel Treasury and relevant departments to report fortnightly on these interventions to Parliament and the public.
The government must now show leadership and the time for the mass anarchy that has come to characterise governance in South Africa must end. Millions of lives depend on it.
For further information please contact: Matthew Parks-COSATU Parliamentary Coordinator
Cell: 082 785 0687
Email: matthew@cosatu.org.za