Internal documents relating to the Road Accident Fund’s internal call centre contract paint a deeply troubling picture of a procurement process that appears to have been rushed, reversed and possibly stage-managed to legitimise a decision already taken.
At the centre of the controversy is a call centre deal valued at more than R100 million, secured through the RAF’s participation in a contract originally awarded by the Department of Employment and Labour (DEL) to service provider Alteram.
Records show that in February 2023, senior RAF officials — including staff from the office of then CEO Collins Letsoalo, who has since been suspended — hurriedly compiled and approved a memorandum requesting the Bid Adjudication Committee (BAC) to ratify the decision to participate in the DEL contract.
The problem, according to the RAF’s own policies, is that the process did not originate from the BAC, as required.
Instead, the memorandum, complete with a business case, was compiled, reviewed and signed off within just 24 hours by the RAF’s Stakeholder Relations Management (SRM) department. It was then sent to the BAC for ratification — effectively asking the committee to approve a process it had neither initiated nor guided.
A decision already taken?
Crucially, the documents reveal that while this internal “approval” process was unfolding, Letsoalo had already written to the DEL director-general, Thobile Lamati, in November and December 2022, requesting permission for the RAF to participate in the Alteram contract.
Those letters invoked regulation 16A6.6 of National Treasury regulations, which allows an accounting officer to piggyback on another department’s competitively bid contract — but only if the terms are identical and written approval is granted.
The timeline suggests that the decision to contract Alteram may have been taken months before the RAF’s internal governance structures were formally engaged.
Put differently, the February 2023 internal processes appear less like a genuine procurement exercise and more like an attempt to retrofit compliance onto a decision already made.
This concern is explicitly acknowledged in the documents themselves. Tshisikhawe Ndou, a senior manager in the SRM department and compiler of the BAC request, noted that the initiation of the process should have been led by the BAC, not management.
Conflict of interest concerns
The governance concerns deepen when examining who approved — and later ratified — the deal.
Chief Financial Officer Bernice Potgieter, one of the executives who reviewed and approved the business case for participating in the DEL contract, later chaired the BAC meeting that ratified the very same request and approved the pricing.
This dual role raises serious conflict of interest concerns, as it undermines the independence of the adjudication process.
Last month, Potgieter, acting CEO Phathu Lukhwareni, acting chief governance officer Mampe Kumalo, and Mpho Manyasha, head of office in the CEO’s office, were all placed on precautionary suspension.
While it remains unclear whether these suspensions are directly linked to the Alteram contract, several of the executives played roles in approving or overseeing the participation process.
Missing paper trail
Further compounding the irregularities is the absence of a paper trail explaining how, when, or by whom the initial study was conducted that led the RAF to identify the DEL contract as a suitable solution for its call centre needs.
When asked this week to provide details of the study, the RAF said it could not confirm any information, referring questions to the suspended executives.
The fund also declined to confirm whether the contract extension was executed in line with Treasury guidelines, again directing queries to officials who are currently suspended and unavailable.
Governance by rubber stamp?
Taken together, the documents raise a fundamental question: Was the RAF’s governance machinery used to interrogate a procurement decision — or merely to legitimise it after the fact?
The use of a 24-hour internal approval process, the sidelining of the BAC at the initiation stage, the apparent pre-approval of the deal months earlier, and the overlap between approvers and adjudicators all point to a system that may have been designed to produce a predetermined outcome.
For an institution already burdened by operational failures, ballooning liabilities and repeated governance crises, the Alteram call centre deal risks becoming another example of how procurement rules can be bent — not to serve the public interest, but to accommodate decisions made behind closed doors.
Accountability still outstanding
As investigations continue and suspensions remain in place, accountability remains elusive. The RAF has yet to explain who authorised the early engagement with DEL, why the BAC was bypassed at inception, or how conflicts of interest were managed — if at all.
For now, the documents speak louder than the institution.
And they tell a story of a R100m+ public contract that appears to have been approved not through rigorous governance, but through a sequence of steps that gave the appearance of compliance — after the decision had already been made.
