Publication: Business Day Issued: Date: 2007-03-14 Reporter: Wyndham Hartley

Cash-Strapped Armscor Set for Shake-Up

 

Publication 

Business Day
Date 2007-03-14

Reporter

Wyndham Hartley 

Web Link

www.businessday.co.za

 

Cape Town ­ Government’s cash-strapped arms acquisition giant Armscor is to be dismembered and is set to lose its research, evaluation, acquisition and procurement functions *1 to standalone agencies yet to be established.

Armscor was at the heart of the R53bn arms deal *2 and some of the allegations of corruption surrounding the strategic arms package still involve the defence company and officials who worked for it. One of Armscor’s functions in the deal was to manage, evaluate and adjudicate the tenders.

Defence analyst Helmoed Romer Heitman said yesterday he understood that in restructuring arms acquisition in the interests of streamlining and cost reduction, Armscor would be “wound down” and two new organisations would be created.

One of these will be the Defence Evaluation and Research Institute, known by the acronym Deri.

Heitman said it was not yet clear whether or not the second body, the Defence Acquisition Support Agency, would complement or replace the current acquisition process.

In Parliament’s defence committee yesterday, Armscor CEO Sipho Thomo said he would have preferred the evaluation and research functions to be “consolidated” within Armscor but accepted that the decision had been taken to create Deri as a standalone institution. He said that there was nothing wrong with this and “the model is good”.

Heitman said Deri would belong to the defence department, but two other key state departments, public enterprises and science and technology, would be represented on Deri’s board.

The public enterprises department controls state armaments manufacturer Denel, and science and technology controls the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

He said Deri would take over some of the functions from Denel and the CSIR. The restructuring was intended for next month but has been put off until next year.

Thomo and his Armscor team painted a bleak picture of the situation at the organisation. He said the right sort of people for Armscor’s core functions, most notably engineers with military knowledge, were not readily available on the job market.

The mainframe computer at Armscor was also outdated and there was little or no support for the computer language and management systems that it used, Thomo said.

Armscor has also been warned that its human resources system can no longer be supported from the end of April this year.

With acknowledgements to Wyndham Hartley and Business Day.


*1       Just what's left after this?


*2      Actually, Armscor was not at the heart of the Arms Deal.

At that time, the DoD led by Chief of Acquisitions, Chippy Shaik, was doing its very best to emasculate Armscor and bring its function under Chippy's DAPD, Defence Acquisition and Projects Department. Armscor was fighting for its very survival as an autonomous acquisition authority and so busy with this battle that it was not concentrating on its core business, which at that time should have been the Arms Deal.

Although lip-service was paid to Armscor statutory mandate, the DoD and its occult bumiputerians was actually calling all of the shots.

At that stage Secretary of Defence Lt Gen Pierre Steyn had been forced out and a temporary caretaker in the form of Mamatho Netsianda (anyone know him) in his place until 3 days before the Arms Deal contracts were signed.

Armscor managing director Tielman de Waal had also been forced out on the pretext of the US sanctions-breaking balls-up by Armscor and Fuchs and replaced by onside white bumiputerian Ron Haywood as both chairman and CEO.

Doing all the real work was another Armscor stalwart, Erich Esterhuyse, general manager of aeronautics and "promoted" to acting managing director. But he was soon hoofed out when he and Lt Gen Steyn caught onto Modise's and Chippy's Hawk and Gripen shenanigens.

Then, realizing a conflicting overlap of Haywood's duties and with Esterhuyse safely out of the way, Comrade Joe Modise appointed another onside white bumiputerian, Llew Swan as CEO of Armscor.

Now things got sailing plainly for Joe and Chippy and their backers, Thabo Mbeki and Alec Erwin.

That is, until they ran into The Fishers of Corrupt Men.