You heard the term ‘tenderpreneur’. This is a person who submits a price to do some work against a government or quasi-government tender.

The price the person submits is generally higher than anybody else’s, but, until recently, the tenderpreneur always got the job, since he or she had a government friend who was doing the evaluation or, more often, he or she was doing the evaluation and their friend or relative was doing the submission.

It is no exaggeration to say that this style of operation was rife throughout all the metros controlled by the ruling party as well as in government. Further, the people involved had absolutely no shame at all. I remember, about ten years ago, when I submitted with a consortium of people a tender for some audio and acoustics work for the Houses of Parliament.

Our group and three other consortiums placed our tenders in the box at the Houses of Parliament five minutes before tender opening time and we waited until the tenders were collected. The representatives of the Houses of Parliament collected the tender documents and then walked off. We stopped them and said : “Hello? Hello? It’s an open tender and you have to read out the prices offered.” The Houses of Parliament people said no, they did not. We read to them from their conditions of tender and said, yes, you do – it says so. With bad grace, the Houses of Parliament people read out the prices and then, as an afterthought, said well, there are other prices – we have some tenders inside – but we cannot read out the prices because they are in the safe and we do not have the key.

Guess what – none of the consortiums got the job. At the time, I was disgusted (I still am). Lately, however, government and quasi-government tenders have become more stringent. They all contain a long section in which you have to say that you are not a member of government or related to a member of government or related to a person who is related to a member of government . . . and so on.

This is meant to have eliminated the practice of tenderpreneurship. Until recently, I thought it was so. But a new scam has arisen. I am not sure what to call it – a good term may be ‘nonresponsive tenderpreneurship’. It goes like this: for any tender, it is accepted by government that certain people, when asked to tender, will not supply a price. Perhaps they are too busy or just do not feel that they can supply the goods. Government rules are that they must get three prices for the supply of any equipment or services. If, however, they ask three organisations and only two respond, the decision is made between the two organisations who were responsive. The rules have been followed – three prices were asked for.

Consider now the following situation: my consulting practice, which is a consulting acoustics and electrical engineering practice, is not in the business of supplying goods. So, it is a surprise to get from various government departments requests to tender on various items which we can never and have never supplied. We have been asked to supply filters for medical blood filtration units, for solar panels for rural development, for software for accounting purposes. You get the picture?

I thought these were simple errors but, when following up to find out the value of the awards, it was astonishing the sums involved. Then I realised that there is a new form of scam: all they do is ask somebody such as us to bid on something we are not going to supply. We do not respond and, presumably, there is another person asked who does not respond and then they can award the bid to the only tenderer, who actually responds with the price, an astronomically high price. A scam. I am full of admiration that government people can work out a new way to crook the system. It is so clever. My only hope is that this new scam was invented in South Africa. I would be very disappointed if it was adapted from another corrupt country. To be a copycat is so demeaning.