Ramaphosa: Govt has learnt lesson from PPE tender corruption
President Cyril Ramaphosa has conceded that the government made a mistake by outsourcing the procurement of Personal Protective Equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic.
He spoke at the National Anti-Corruption Advisory Council in Boksburg on Wednesday.
Dozens of cases are before courts countrywide, with several high-ranking officials in the dock for corruption, which has cost the state millions.
At the height of the pandemic, government departments and municipalities procured sanitiser and face masks at inflated prices from suppliers, which often had links to the procurement officer or senior officials.
Ramaphosa said people quickly set up companies specifically to get tenders to supply the resources.
"When we went through Covid-19 PPEs, and mistakenly, that's where sometimes I say we made a mistake. I also made a mistake in having the PPEs distributed to our people as this was a moment of great need, and people set up companies just days before PPEs were made available. Money was there; they saw it coming, and they grabbed the opportunity.
"But it was interesting to read that the experience that we went through was similar to the experience that other developed countries went through, the UK, US, African countries and many others. However, it was sobering."
Ramaphosa insisted that the government had learnt a lesson and did things differently with the procurement of vaccines.
"But what we did afterwards was more important, for me much more important, was that we learnt a lesson when we had to deal with vaccines, we decided that this is centralised, it will only be distributed by the state. We had learnt a lesson.
"The other important lesson was to ensure that follow up the corruption, we set up the fusion centre which brought together various crime-fighting agencies, SARS, NPA, SIU, Hawks they worked together," he said.
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