UMHLATHUZE City officials received a tongue lashing from Mayor Elphas Mbatha over the lengthy delay of tenders owing to changes in the awarding of contracts and subsequent objections.
At Tuesday’s Executive Committee meeting, Councillors demanded an explanation as to why a tender for the maintenance of cubicles/kiosks and pole mounted transformers was up for re-evaluation after a year had already lapsed.
The contract for the period 1 November to 31 October 2017 was supposed to be awarded to three tenderers according to initial specifications advertised.
However, at a Bid Adjudication Committee on 26 February, a new resolution was taken to award the contract to a single tenderer, thereby deviating from the original decision taken just two days earlier.
This resulted in one of the tenderers – Sompisi Electrical submitting an objection because the tender had been awarded to a single contractor – AC Mthembu Electrical, which was a deviation from the initial specification.
A report, which surfaced before Exco on Tuesday, requested that the resolution taken on 26 February be rescinded so that new recommendations could be made to incorporate three different tenderers.
Answers
However, the Mayor withdrew the item, referring the report back and demanding answers for the oversight.
‘Even if this item is withdrawn, how is this happening? These are serious challenges and how do we appoint someone who does not comply with the specifications?’ questioned Mbatha.
‘I am not happy with this entire tender. Twelve months have passed and the contract has not been awarded, which impacts on service delivery,’ said Mbatha.
‘We need to know what happened so that is does not happen again,’ said Deputy Mayor Vera Gumbi. ‘We do not expect this from our officials. This is why we do not spend our money and MIG funding. We are a big municipality yet smaller municipalities are doing far better than us.’
Deputy Municipal Manager: Infrastructure and Technical Services, Tumelo Gopane said they had preferred the appointment of one contractor for all three sections because the other contractors were ‘way too expensive’.
However, he told Councillors they had since cancelled the tender to repackage the specifications and scope to include three tenderers.
