Valuable Friends

Jozi DA embraces ANC crony with R100m tender.

- Jonathan Erasmus

THE CITY OF JOHANNESBURG, LED BY THE DA, has quietly awarded a tender of nearly R100 million to a company which eight years ago they accused of being part of the ANC’s “crony” capitalist machine of tender rigging, jobs-for-pals, and substantial backhanders. And they don’t want anything said about it.

eValuations Enhanced Property Appraisals has won the right to value nearly 900,000 properties in Johannesburg for the General Valuation Roll 2018 (GV2018). They were awarded the tender through what appears to be a dodgy process pushed through just days before the ANC lost power in the metro.

eValuations only won the contract when the first tender (under Bid A654, in which eValuations was the third lowest bid, with the worst BBB-EE scorecard) was mysteriously withdrawn and then re-issued and re-advertised as Bid A683. When the bids came in on this round, lo and behold, eValuations came in as the lowest bid.

The only confirmation that the tender had been awarded to eValuations came as a passing remark in an off-chance telephone conversation with a strategic advisor to the Joburg council. The advisor promised to email Noseweek formal comment, but never did.

eValuations’ founder, a known ANC backer and KZN Teflon Club member who has been fingered in questionable contracts in Durban, is Willy Govender (see nose203).

Govender once boasted in a 2011 interview with Entrepreneur Magazine that “90%” of his growing business empire’s work was from “the public sector” and that they already had a turnover of R250m which he hoped to grow to R1 billion by 2016.

In February 2009 Helen Zille, then DA leader, said eValuations and Willy Govender were part of “closed, crony politics” and that Govender had been awarded the valuation contract in Durban in 2008 because he was “a wellknown backer of the ruling party”.