Note to Editors: Attached please find a soundbite in English by Michael Waters MPL here.
The Gauteng Department of e-Government spent approximately R1.38 billion on a small group of suppliers and service providers during the 2025/26 financial year, raising serious questions about the department’s reliance on external service providers and whether taxpayers are receiving value for money. Large portions of its budget flow to third-party service providers.
The Democratic Alliance will submit further questions to the MEC for e-Government, Bonginkosi Dhlamini, demanding a detailed reconciliation of the department’s expenditure on external service providers. This will include the total amount spent on external and third-party service providers as a percentage of the department’s overall budget, as well as the number and value of contracts awarded through deviations and single-source procurement.
This raises the question of whether the department has sufficient internal skills and capacity to fulfil its mandate of driving digital transformation across the public service. Furthermore, this department is also responsible for the Gauteng Broadband Network, which is meant to connect public government spaces such as clinics and libraries.
The staggering expenditure was revealed in a written reply to questions tabled by the DA in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature requesting details of payments made to the department’s major suppliers.
In one glaring example, the latest reply describes a R78.6 million contract with Microsoft Azure to lease 6000 cameras.
In a previous response to DA inquiries, the department indicated that a contract worth R78,629,760 was awarded to Vumacam for access to 6000 cameras throughout the Gauteng City Region, starting from 1 February 2024.
The department later disclosed that it awarded a further contract of R61.96 million to Vumacam from 1 April 2026 for access to 7 271 cameras.
How can a department spending hundreds of millions of rands on ICT contracts confuse a Microsoft Azure service with a multimillion-rand Vumacam surveillance contract?
This follows the department’s admission that its unpaid Microsoft license debt once ballooned to R631 million because of invoices being received late or not processed on time.
To put the figure into perspective, e-Government’s adjusted budget for the entire 2025/26 financial year was approximately R1.94 billion. This means payments to the suppliers disclosed in this reply alone equate to approximately 71% of the department’s entire adjusted annual budget.
Even more concerning is that these are not all the department’s suppliers.
Among the largest payments disclosed is approximately R642.6 million paid to the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) during the 2025/26 financial year alone.
The department’s own difficulties with managing these contracts make the scale of this expenditure even more concerning.
In addition, the DA requests clarification regarding the misidentification of the Vumacam contract as Microsoft Azure and assurance that other supplier and contract information provided to the Legislature has been verified.
Gauteng cannot continue pouring billions of rands into ICT without being able to demonstrate that residents are receiving value for money.
When approximately R7 out of every R10 in the department’s adjusted annual budget is equivalent to the amount paid to the suppliers disclosed in this reply, taxpayers are entitled to know exactly what they are receiving for their money.
A DA-led Gauteng provincial government will ensure that every rand spent by the department provides value for money and, where possible, reduces reliance on third-party suppliers.