Stories of tender irregularities and scandals are nothing new to the South African Corporate context, but a more recent and a more shocking story of tender irregularities in the government is the government’s failure to deliver textbooks in Limpopo. According to the released news report, the Department of Education in Limpopo gave out a tender to a company the news report calls the “big wigs” without following procedural regulations and as far as I’m concerned that is an illicit tender handout.
 
Schools in Limpopo were without textbooks for months after schools had resumed because the “big wig” company missed its tender deadline and failed to deliver textbooks, in simpler words, they bungled the tender. Now depending on how accurate the news report is, this is justified reason why South Africa no longer needs the tender system.
 
For some funny reason the government always manages to turn all their great ideas and policies into a platform for corruption and self enrichment at the expense of tax payers and poorer South Africans. And this can be attributed to the dismal failure of the Black Economic Empowerment Act (BEE), whereby they come with these great policies at face value to address inequality and the socio-economic injustices of the past but always manage to deliberately mishandle their OWN policies in which are set to benefit their OWN people, and yes corruption is deliberate.
 
It seems as though the ruling elite have developed a culture or an attitude of greed, a mentality of ‘survival of the fittest’ and it is best expressed in the words of a writer named Boyane John Tshehla “As a result of this spectacular manifestation of the culture of ‘it’s our time to eat’ some school children must suffer because top politicians and businessmen find it necessary to increase their wealth”.
The Young Communist Youth league has called for the government to ban the tender system saying that “we believe that the shortage of medicine, textbooks, education and health infrastructure and many short falls are as a result” and they further stated that “tenders corrupt our public service and our politics to the detriment of our society and the confidence it has on our government”.
 
A friend of mine on twitter had the following to say about illicit tender handouts; @_thabang_m: “Corporate SA is belligerent to black South Africans; illicit tenders are the only business to some of these guys”. Without any justifications it is however true that we are still residing in an economy that is not very friendly to your average black man and our self enriching government is not helping either but instead encouraging it.

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Please note: The views expressed in this article do not reflect the views of Global Edge Media and are the opinions of the writer involved.