Officials warned to stay away from tenders

Johannesburg - Members of the Mpumalanga executive, mayors and senior managers have been warned not to get involved in tender processes.

"These quotations for tenders are milking the government, [and] government's resources end up not going in the right way," premier David Mabuza said in a statement received on Sunday.

"Out of these tenders there is a lot of corruption, therefore for the politicians to be involved in the quotations means that we are deliberately killing the efforts of small business."

These were comments made by Mabuza at the last day of the provincial senior management summit held in White River on Friday.

Mabuza warned there would be consequences for those who delayed payment of service providers within 30 days after a service had been rendered to government.

Politicians demanding that things go their way created friction between themselves and senior managers in government.

"The shortcoming on some of the politicians is that we are not knowledgeable, we are just lay people who are on leadership positions because we are voted by the people," he said.

"There are some political leaders who refuse to learn, some are lazy to think, they can only shout at the people below them and become arrogant."

Mabuza said politicians needed to spare time to read so that they could gain knowledge about their environment, otherwise institutions they led would be leaderless.

"As for the administrators, they should not derive pleasure if their political principals are blank on administrative matters, they should help them understand because nobody was born knowing everything."

Administrators spent more time unpacking a problem whereas the politicians dealt with it politically.

South Africa needed to shift from understanding the problem to dealing with it, he said.