ANC ally Cosatu seems to be losing patience with President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The union federation yesterday said it welcomed the call for Finance Minister Tito Mboweni and National Treasury to appear before it to account for PPE tender scandals.
“Cosatu repeatedly raised with government and publicly the massive loopholes in public procurement of PPEs, which resulted in industrial-scale looting, supplying shoddy PPEs and how this is endangering the lives of thousands of public health workers and their families, some having died as a result.”
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It said potentially, billions of rands were lost on cheap imports when products could have been locally bought and thousands of jobs saved.
“Government needs to move with speed to halt the rot in procurement of PPEs and send a message to the public that it is serious about tackling the cancer of corruption.”
The union called on government to centralise the public procurement of PPEs for the entire state under the finance ministry.
It called for PPE procurement contracts only to be given to local, legally-compliant manufacturers and details of all these contracts awarded by the state to be published, as well as for politicians and their families to be banned from state tenders.
