Suspect deals rife but I'm innocent - Cele
2010-09-03 22:33
Cape Town - Police top brass abused a 2006 decision to let the force manage its own properties with carte blanche to award irregular contracts that wasted millions and enriched outsiders, Parliament heard on Friday.
Police commissioner General Bheki Cele told MPs he was asked to rubberstamp suspect deals from the day he took office in July 2009, suggesting that the practice was common and had carried on for years.
He said he declined a spurious request by former deputy commissioner Hamilton Hlele to sign an R11m contract to renovate his office and that of Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa, though the police merely rented the properties.
Months later he learnt by accident that the contract had been signed.
Cele said he subsequently came across a contract essentially outsourcing the police's forensics operations to a company belonging to the spouse of a police official and another, worth R47m, to buy water canons the police did not need.
"We discovered a huge document intercepted in London, completely outsourcing the department.
"There would have been no Saps forensics if that thing was not intercepted," he told Parliament's portfolio committee on police.
Action necessary
Cele said the deals were part of a "slash and grab" mentally on the part of senior officers, and hinted at the involvement of two other deputy commissioners who have, like Hlele, left the force.
Police committee chairperson Sindi Chikunga said the revelations left her disgusted and wishing she could see the men jailed.
"We may as well tell them you have to go to report to the nearest police station. I'm talking about the highest order of mismanagement you can think of at the highest level. It is discouraging and it is really disgusting."
Cele also conceded the police's building management programme, which seeks to devolve responsibility for all 1 127 police stations nationwide from public works to police in coming years, was so badly and unethically managed that "if we had gone to court we would be pleading guilty".
He said 18% of this budget went directly to consultants, partly because the department's capacity was limited, and partly because the personnel it did have, including some 38 bricklayers, merely acted in an oversight capacity.
"Theirs is not to lay bricks - it's to get people from outside and oversee."
Huge cracks in system
The police chief said the faulty logic of not leaving construction in the hands of public works became evident to him when it took five months to construct a simple guard post at his official residence, and a police station was built without toilets.
"Then I understood why the police station takes seven years, if the guard house takes five months...
Public works gives you a lot of headache but the process you get with SAPS cracks your head."
Gary Kruser, the acting commissioner for supply chain management in the police since July, said the division had a deservedly poor reputation. It had neither sound financial planning nor a legitimate procurement system and paid scant regard to customer relations.
"How much money we can spend, how much money we can outsource seems to be the guiding principle of this division," Kruser said.
"It seems that the only customer relations we have is with those people who make money out of us."
Dipping hands into honey pot
ANC MP Anneliese van Wyk said the government should revise its decision to allow the police to manage property, because it lacked the capacity to do so, and a plan to clean up the mismanagement of the past four years.
She suggested the request from senior management in March 2006 to devolve responsibility had been motivated by greed.
"It was opening the honey pot and dipping your hands into it," Van Wyk said.
Cele again denied media reports that he too had sidestepped procurement rules and signed a R500m lease for a new police headquarters in Pretoria, saying the department of public service inked the contract now being probed by the Special Investigating Unit.
"The contract has been signed, but there is no Cele (signature). It's not there."
- SAPA