Provincial dept put on ice

The Northern Cape provincial department of health will remain under the administration of the provincial treasury and the premier’s office ‘until such a time that our turnaround strategy is complete,” says the department’s acting MEC, Gomolemo Lucas.

Instead of operating independently, the day-to-day running of the department will be in the hands of the treasury and the premier, a development the opposition Democratic Alliance in the province has welcomed.

Local chairperson of the DA in the Northern Cape, Chris Liebenberg, applauded the decision and said the running down of the department ‘is not in the interests of our people”. Liebenberg decried what he called nepotism, flouting of tender processes and other misdemeanours by public officials, behaviour which, he says, goes back to 1999.

Lucas said the department wants to put in place ‘prudent financial systems” that will see department spending match budgetary allocations. He confirmed that the department had been ‘unable to deal adequately with revenue collection”.

Lucas said the office of the chief financial officer needs to be strengthened and admitted that there were irregularities in the procurement process — an area whose ‘integrity needs to be protected.”

Lucas’s statements confirm the findings of the Auditor General last year that highlighted a litany of irregularities, especially in procurement.

In the report tabled before the provincial legislature, the AG’s office found evidence of problems ranging from sheer incompetence to blatant fraud.

In the 2005/6 financial year, an unspecified number of officials in the department were suspended for attempting to defraud the department of R1,7-million by altering bank details of a supplier and then trying to make a second payment into their own private accounts.

However, it is on the province’s handling of the procurement process that the AG came down hardest. For instance, the AG queried why the department bought food parcels of R1,8-million without calling for tenders, in clear violation of the requirement that all purchases of more than R200 000 by government departments should be tendered for.

In one instance, a R410 000 payment for clothing and related promotional material was split into four payments to avoid exceeding the R200 000 threshold.

The AG’s office also found that some of the companies that tendered for these products were bogus. Several companies had the same contact details as the successful supplier, and some of the quotations from ‘rival” companies were faxed from the successful supplier’s fax machine.

The health department was also criticised for improper disposal of medical waste, some of which was disposed of with ordinary household waste.

The AG also found that the department stocked medicines that were close to the expiry date, with no contingency measures to replace them. At certain centres, medicines had run out.

Gareth Morgan, DA spokesperson on health, said other provinces should also be probed. In Limpopo, the DA said, the procurement process was irregular, newly constructed buildings were already coming apart and hospitals did not have adequate registers of stock.

Citing the AG’s report, the Free State health department had been criticised for delays in the completion of construction projects and outstanding patient debts of R147-million, for which no interest had been charged.

Morgan said the DA would be ‘submitting a question to the minister of health to determine whether any such action is anticipated” in these provinces.