The State Information and Technology Agency (Sita) has hit back at the mineral resources & energy department, blaming officials there for the lengthy delay in buying a new mining cadastral system that would enable SA to ignite exploration.
Sita has also made it clear that the officials’ conduct has raised questions about the integrity of the procurement process for the new system.
A fully functional cadastral system is publicly accessible and maps the boundaries of every farm or piece of land, setting out what licences have been awarded to which prospectors for what minerals and also allowing for new applications to be transparently processed.
SA has not had a properly functioning mining cadastral system for a decade, which means there is no transparent, accessible system of mapping and registering prospecting rights. This is the main reason that SA accounts for just 1% of global mining exploration spending, despite its rich mineral deposits. This is well below the 5% government’s recent mining exploration strategy aims to achieve by 2025.
The mining industry has flagged the lack of a functioning and transparent cadastral system as a key constraint to investment in the industry.
Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe has also expressed his frustration and said at this week’s Mining Indaba that he could not put timelines to the procurement of a new system.
The department’s acting director-general, Patricia Gamede, said Sita, which is responsible for the procurement process, has made no progress.
But Sita MD Luvuyo Keyise told Business Day on Wednesday that five of the procurement committee’s six members are department officials — and they have so far declined to address questions raised by the auditors on the integrity of the process.
Keyise would not disclose what the auditors’ findings were on the grounds that doing so could tarnish the integrity of the procurement process.
He confirmed that the issues raised by the auditors are “serious” matters. “It is not Sita that is sitting not doing anything. It is Sita waiting for the department’s evaluators to come and answer to the auditors,” Keyise said.
“Instead of people answering, they are running,” he said.
The department of mineral resources & energy did not respond to a request for comment.
The tender for a new system closed in August 2021. The Sita Act puts Sita in charge of running tenders for information technology solutions on behalf of all government departments.
Keyise said Sita generally ensures that the people who evaluate the tenders must come from the client departments.
The integrity of every tender process of above R10m is
audited by external auditors before the committee is allowed to go ahead and evaluate and choose the preferred bidder.
Sita usually tries to ensure the process takes no more than 90 days if the auditors are satisfied that the process was objective and independent and followed correct procedures.
The issue goes back a decade to when the department implemented a new digital system, Samrad, which the department built itself but which never functioned properly. The result is that many of the applications for prospecting licences continue to be paper based, and potential applicants for new exploration licences are unable to see the mapping of who owns which piece of land and what minerals they are prospecting for.
There are also concerns that the lack of a transparent digital system provides a cover for corruption in the award of prospecting licences.
Industry players say that the underlying data for the department’s existing system is so corrupted that even a new digital cadastral system would not solve the problem.
The Minerals Council SA said this week that Keyise said he had written to the minister of communications to provide an update on the tender and had copied the mineral resources & energy minister.
He said the minister had asked the communications
minister for the department to be able to run the procurement process itself.
The department has a backlog of at least 4,500 mining and prospecting licences.
The Minerals Council said this week that clearing the backlog could unlock new mining investments worth R30bn.
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