Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu: Here rests Country SA, born 1994, felled by tenderinitis

Ah, Chief Dwasaho! Our country is sick. The prognosis isn’t looking great, so I began my letter to you on 20 August 2020; by today, five years, 0 months, and 16 days – or 1,842 days later – still no answer from the highest office in the land. My plea for bold leadership to save our country from impending doom has been met with radio silence.

It’s one thing not to respect me, but quite another to ignore a plea made on behalf of 63.02 million South Africans. Although I do not matter in the higher echelons of power or the grand theatre of our body politic, I, son of MaMlambo, have sent Country South Africa for a second opinion – a thorough medical check-up.

In the ANC’s paper trail, this would be stamped with that old exile mantra: unmandated reflections. That’s the label slapped on inconvenient truths and their messengers before being filed where sunlight never visits.

Tenderinitis

My political physician reports that most civil servants, the wives of ANC leaders, and ANC leaders themselves (who – bless their hearts – don’t even bother sitting in tender committees) suffer from the viral disease, tenderinitis. Tenderinitis is a condition of moral depravity that attacks and disables the core of what makes us human. It propels its sufferers to unearned riches and vain applause.

Take the Government Pensions Administration Agency (GPAA), which recently awarded a contract worth R521-million for a biometrics deal to a company with no directors – yes, you heard correctly, no one at the head, yet a multimillion-rand contract still walked out the door. The GPAA has already paid R43-million to LCS Technologies, which CIPC records show is being deregistered for annual return non-compliance, before it had completed a single line of work.

Then the same agency, the latest self-proclaimed innovator in supply chain management, had earlier bought (paid) comrades (those at the back, lower the music and pay attention, read slowly): a fictitious headquarters lease for 10 years.

Yes, the GPAA, custodian of millions of public servants’ retirement security, allegedly agreed to pay just under R1-billion to lease a non-existent building without so much as a stethoscope laid on procurement processes.

The cherry on this grotesque cake? The deal was struck with Shula Developers for a building neither owned nor accessible by Shula Developers, a ghost property in every sense, but one that somehow managed to send real invoices to the state.

Touring cash

Then there’s SA Tourism, handing a R100-million event-management tender to Pomme Express, whose track record is as thin as its paper credentials. Investigators flagged forgery, fictitious proof of execution and blatant favouritism. Pomme Express was even reported to have failed to show evidence of experience. It allegedly submitted false and misleading information in its bid to organise Meetings Africa 2025 and Africa’s Travel Indaba 2025.

These are not “errors”. They are clinical signs of a system that treats looting as standard operating procedure. When the chart reads like this across multiple wards, you no longer have a cluster, but an epidemic.

Moral Deficiency Syndrome

The World Tender Organisation (WTO) – that august body of my imagination – classifies the advanced stage as Moral Deficiency Syndrome: an incurable upper-respiratory disease of the body politic.

It begins with heavy breathing about service to “our people” and ends with the public purse ventilated to death.

• Stage One: (exposure): all capes and crusades.


• Stage Two: (acquisition): penthouse privileges, blue-light convoys and friendly invoices.


• Stage Three: unearned riches flaunted; mutterings that no country exists without the movement.


• Stage Four: (collusion): the patient is “not a friend, not an acquaintance, not an associate” – yet places 10 calls in a day to a tender kingpin.


• Stage Five: freezing orders, pre-dawn knocks, and the faithful at the court gates (often skipped).


• Stage Six: (hallucinations): phantom companies with gilded CVs; forged certificates paraded as transformation; paperwork that looks like development until the lights return.

Comorbidities

Once in the bloodstream, classic comorbidities appear: inflated contract values, ghost bidders conjured from thin air, back-channel instructions in dark corridors and bid-rigging canonised as “empowerment”.

In practice, it is an ANC-aligned-comrade model: proximity to the trough outranks merit. Headless bidders float through; fabricated experience is rebranded as “capacity”; costs that should build clinics and schools are rubber-stamped before the ink dries.

As the infection advances, the signs sharpen: fiscal haemorrhage, sudden amnesia at parliamentary committees when documents surface, and private balances swelling without commensurate work. This is the hallucination phase – delusion passes for policy and policy for loot.

The cast

My case study of tenderinitis diseases focuses on former police minister, General Bheki Cele, who pledged to “fight crime” while gaslighting the nation with tough talk as crime mounted unchecked. Instead of fighting crime, self-made General Cele chose a different alliance that reeks of compromise and cosy favours. He admitted to staying twice in a luxury penthouse owned by tender kingpin and murder accused Vusimusi “Cat” Matlala at The Capital Menlyn Main in Pretoria.

Then things get even stranger: phone records show Cele attempted to reach tender kingpin “Cat” Matlala 10 times in a single day, on 9 May 2025. It was as the walls closed in on Matlala, days before his R360-million SAPS health services contract, which he obtained despite zero qualifications, was cancelled and his subsequent arrest loomed.

So that we are all clear, my leader, and for the benefit of all five readers of this column: the self-styled General says he isn’t friends with the tender tycoon; not an acquaintance, not a business partner, and certainly not an associate. This explains the frantic missed calls.

If it sounds familiar to Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, now on enforced leave, it’s because it is.

Enter Brown Mogotsi, no blood relation to Mchunu, merely a “fellow comrade”. He sits at the centre of allegations of political interference and underworld ties, not least the disbanding of KZN’s political killings task team. And, as luck would have it, he knows Cat Matlala. Stranger still: another murder-accused, Katiso “KT” Molefe, knows Cat Matlala too.

The General had not explained his frantic calls when we went to press. Like a patient refusing to disclose symptoms, he stays tight-lipped while the nation coughs. His comment will be added if he ever musters the courage to speak. Until then, we wait, phones charged, airtime loaded.

Crackdown on corruption, my foot

Not far behind, you, my leader, pledged to “crack down on corruption”, vowing to restore dignity while your ranks remained riddled with decay.

“Billions of rands have been illegally diverted to individuals,” you declared with a straight face at the ANC’s 106th anniversary celebration as though the guilty were strangers in the room, not comrades seated at the high table. Yes, as is documented by News24, many commission inquiries, including the Mpati Commission into the Public Investment Corporation and Nugent Commission at Sars, have resulted in nothing of value, no convictions.

Final diagnosis

The tests are back; the prognosis is terminal. The patient did not die of natural causes. The chart records untreated tenderinitis complicated by procurement sepsis and catastrophic haemorrhage of the public purse.

The liver (local government) failed from patronage cirrhosis; the kidneys (oversight) shut down; the spine (courage) collapsed; and the lungs (power and water) ceased under rolling blackouts and dry taps. Commissions issued diagnoses without medicine; warrants arrived post-mortem.

Despite the best efforts of the attending team – the media, the commentariat and the judiciary – our dearest country, South Africa, slipped away quietly at 13:00 on Sunday, 6 July 2025, alone in a ward without running water. Cause of death: untreated tenderinitis.

Epitaph

Here rests Country South Africa, born in 1994, felled by preventable illness. Beloved child of Freedom and Hope; survived by citizens, unpaid bills and an overdraft.

Her will bequeaths courage to journalists, shelter to whistleblowers and victims of gender-based violence, and every future national Budget to service delivery.

Mourners are asked to bring warrants, not wreaths. No flowers: plant oversight. No hymns: read the Auditor-General South Africa report and weep. No slogans. Pallbearers: women who fetched water from the tanker mafia and paid twice. Raise no marble: instead, build more magistrates’ courts and water treatment plants, and hire more educated crime investigators, auditors and prosecutors. And when she rises, because nations can, do not clap. Fix the country.

Till next week, my man. Send me nowhere, I quit. DM