small contracts to help them gain experience. The contracts were
mostly for road maintenance, grass cutting and related projects.^10
Thanks to the CDP, emerging contractors from all over the Free State
had an opportunity to gain valuable experience and earn much-needed
revenues to get their businesses going. Other provincial departments
ran similar initiatives, but the province’s expenditure on the DPRT’s
CDP alone was by no means insignificant. In Magashule’s nine years
as premier, the Free State spent almost R 2 billion on CDP contracts
and other costs related to the programme.^11
The 2013 / 14 auditor-general’s report on the DPRT unwittingly
revealed when Magashule seemingly began to take an interest in the
CDP. In that year, ‘the Premier requested an independent consulting
firm to conduct an investigation at the department relating to the
verification of Contractor Development Program (CDP) Contractors,’
read the report. Ironically, ‘the investigation was initiated based on
irregularities and allegations of misconduct and corruption on the part
of certain employees of the department’.^12 Later developments suggest
that Magashule intervened for entirely different reasons.
In 2015 , the DPRT expanded the CDP to include new emerging
contractors, the names of which were subsequently announced in an
April 2016 government tender bulletin. Of the thirty-three new CDP
companies, thirty-one hailed from the area around Parys. ‘[The] Fezile
Dabi region was overlooked in previous years,’ the department later
claimed in a presentation document on its development programme.^13
I started to research the new CDP companies for an article in the
Daily Maverick, and could scarcely believe to what extent the
programme had been transformed into a feeding trough for relatives of
the province’s political elite. Among the new contractors were
nora
(Nora)
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