Documents relating to the procurement of the Road Accident Fund internal call centre show significant process irregularities.
In February 2023 senior RAF officials, including those in suspended CEO Collins Letsoalo’s office, hastily compiled and approved a memorandum asking the RAF’s bid adjudication committee (BAC) to ratify the process for participating in a department of employment & labour (DEL) contract with Alteram.
This was despite the process not originating from the BAC, as required by the fund’s policy.
The request, which included a business case, was compiled and signed off in a 24-hour period by the RAF’s stakeholder relations management (SRM) department.
Crucially the documents show that while this internal process was under way, Letsoalo had already written to the then DEL director-general Thobile Lamati in November and December 2022 for permission to participate in that department’s contract with Alteram.
This was done using regulation 16A6.6 of the National Treasury’s regulations, which allows an accounting officer to participate in another department’s competitively bid contract, provided conditions are exactly the same and written approval is granted.
This suggests that a decision to contract Alteram had been taken in 2022, and the February 2023 internal processes were an attempt to create the illusion of a process.
BAC request compiler Tshisikhawe Ndou, a senior manager in the SRM department, explicitly noted that the decision to participate in and the initiation of the process should have been led by the BAC.
Further compounding the irregularity, CFO Bernice Potgieter, who was one of the executives who reviewed and approved the business case, later chaired the BAC meeting that ratified the request and approved the price, creating a conflict of interest.
Last month Potgieter, acting CEO Phathu Lukhwareni, acting chief governance officer Mampe Kumalo and head of office in the CEO’s Mpho Manyasha were placed on precautionary suspension.
Though some of the executives played a role in the approval of the participation contract, it is not clear whether the suspensions are related to this.
There was also no paper trail showing how, when and by whom the study that led the RAF to the DEL was done, and this week the RAF said it could not confirm any information about this study, referring the Sunday Times to the suspended executives.
The fund could also not confirm whether the contract extension was done in accordance with Treasury guidelines, again referring the Sunday Times to those executives.
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