Mismanagement at the Gauteng Department of Social Development has caused huge delays in funding for non-profit organisations that help vulnerable people.
- There are thousands of food parcels in storage in Gauteng but no funds to distribute them.
- The food parcels were delivered by private companies between March and May.
- The Gauteng Department of Social Development finalised a tender process for the distribution of the food parcels in September 2023. And then it decided not to award the tender.
- The reason given was that the tender did not make provision for seeds for people to grow their own vegetables.
- Instead the department decided to appoint 15 companies to supply food parcels. They were paid a total of R22-million by the department as part of a deviation from tender processes.
Thousands of food parcels meant for low-income households are gathering dust in Gauteng’s food banks, due to payment delays by the Gauteng Department of Social Development.
Food banks are run by non-profit organisations that have contracts with the department to distribute food parcels to beneficiaries. The food parcels are traditionally supplied to the food banks by companies appointed by the department through a tender process.
For the first nine months of the 2023/24 financial year, the food banks were out of stock because the department had experienced delays in its tender process to appoint supplier companies.
By September 2023, the tender process had been finalised, but the department decided not to award the tender because it did not make provision for seeds for people to grow their own vegetables, according to documents leaked to GroundUp.
Instead, the department decided to use emergency regulations to appoint 15 suppliers of food parcels in February 2024, spending a total of R22-million.
Deviations from usual tender procurement processes are allowed under certain circumstances, including in emergency situations. The department told its bid adjudication committee that “procurement by other means” was necessitated by the high rates of food insecurity in the province.
Seventeen companies were selected from the Central Supplier Database and asked for quotations, and 15 were awarded contracts.
The companies signed three-month contracts to supply thousands of food parcels to the province’s food banks.
But the food banks were only funded until the end of March 2024, when the financial year ended. So when the food banks received thousands of food parcels throughout April, they did not have funds to distribute them to beneficiaries.
GroundUp has seen internal documents from the department where additional funds were approved to pay food banks so that they could distribute the food parcels, but it appears this never happened.
Two food banks GroundUp spoke to said that they have thousands of food parcels piling up in their warehouses and that they have not received any funding from the department since the last financial year.
The department did not respond to our detailed questions, despite several follow-up attempts. However, the department recently posted a picture on Facebook of the new MEC for Social Development, Faith Mazibuko, visiting food banks, suggesting there are attempts to resolve issues facing the food programme.
Deviations
The appointment of 15 suppliers without tender processes was one of several deviations from supply chain management processes by the department in the last few months of 2023/24, in a bid to spend its budget by the end of the financial year.
By September 2023 the department had only spent 37% of its budget for goods and services, which included food parcels and dignity packs.
In February, the department spent R159-million on 1.7-million dignity packs, once again not going through tender processes and using emergency regulations. Dignity packs are made up of sanitary pads and other feminine hygiene products, distributed mainly to schools.
Several of the companies appointed to provide food parcels were also contracted to supply dignity packs, according to documents seen by GroundUp, meaning that the companies benefitted more than once from the department’s deviations from tender processes.
Some also benefitted from the department’s December Festive Season food campaign, in which five companies were appointed to supply food, receiving between R5-million and R8-million each, according to documents leaked to GroundUp. In total, R37-million was spent on the campaign.
Pictures on the department’s social media pages from December 2023 show former MEC for Social Development Mbali Hlophe, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi, and the former Head of Department Matilda Gasela, handing out food parcels wearing Christmas hats.
Zain Abubaker, the owner of Pietermaritzurg-based Zain Brothers, which supplied food to Red Cross Soweto as part of the Festive Season Campaign, is also the owner of another company, Lateomark, which was one of the companies contracted in February to deliver food parcels to food banks.
Abubaker’s attorneys, responding to our written questions, denied that there were any links between these contracts, as Zain Brothers dealt directly with Red Cross South Africa and Lateomark dealt directly with the department.
LTC Holding, a logistics company involved in the supply of food parcels for the Festive Season programme, was also one of the companies selected by the department in February to supply food parcels to the food banks. LTC Holding did not respond to our questions.
The document approving the expenditure for the Festive Season campaign was signed off by the Head of Department Matilda Gasela and two other senior officials, including the Chief Financial Officer Johann Strauss.
Ithemba Labantu Development Centre, one of the other organisations in the campaign, told GroundUp they had been personally called by Gasela and invited to become part of the food programme. Asked further questions in writing, they said that it was “none of your business”.
The other organisations that received funding were Red Cross Soweto, Youth for Survival, The Healing Hands, and Life for You. They did not respond to our questions.
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Bruh
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Armed Hawk
Japan: You have two cows. They are replaced by two 3d hologram cows and put in a zoo.