By Marcus Moloko
The Department of Correctional Services (DCS) has found itself in the spotlight after Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services raised concerns over inflated prices in a five-year food-supply contract for prisons.
The controversy centred on reports that the department had paid more than R700 for a litre of cooking oil, along with exorbitant prices for other food items supplied to correctional centres.
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DCS has since said the cooking-oil figure was incorrectly interpreted because of a “capturing error”.
“That was a capturing error. We never bought cooking oil for R726 a litre. What we did buy was 25 litres at R726, which works out to about R29 per litre,” said DCS National Commissioner Makgothi Thobakgale.
The pricing concerns relate to Contract HO4/2023, concluded with 115 service providers for the supply, delivery and off-loading of 66 perishable and non-perishable food items across all six DCS regions. The contract runs for five years, from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2030.
According to the department, the contract was introduced to replace a fragmented procurement system in which regions bought food separately, often through request-for-quotation processes. DCS said that system had led to inconsistent prices, repeated awards to the same suppliers and irregular expenditure of R36.9 million in 2022/23 and R194.7 million in 2023/24.
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The department said its internal monitoring systems picked up pricing variances after the contract was implemented, prompting it to suspend transactions on affected higher-priced items and begin a review.
“On the 13th of May, we issued instructions to all regions to stop buying these items. Our monitoring systems had already picked up that there was a problem with the prices,” said Thobakgale.
DCS said the review covered all 66 commodity items in the contract. Seven items reflected higher pricing, but expenditure had been incurred on only four of them: curry powder, white flour, gravy and spices.
The department said it then engaged affected suppliers to review and renegotiate prices downward, using direct market-price benchmarking rather than Consumer Price Index or Producer Price Index adjustment formulas.
The department also addressed concerns about gravy powder pricing, saying the contract allowed prices to be reviewed after six months but that DCS had started the process earlier because of the pricing concerns.
“The contract allows us to review prices after six months. We started reviewing prices in the third month, which was June. We agreed with the minister that we would not only look at these items, but the whole contract, including bread,” he said.
DCS said the revised prices were applied uniformly across suppliers within each region and that the next round of price reviews and renegotiations had already begun.
