The Department of Basic Education strongly rejects the slanderous allegations against the Director-General (DG) made in the article by journalist Siyabonga Mkhwanazi, published in The New Age on Monday 6 August 2012, under the headline ‘Textbooks: DG must go’.
The department refutes the allegation that the Director-General was responsible for the delay in the ordering of textbooks.
The journalist claims that the Task Team’s report assumes a link between the Director-General and EduSolutions, the service provider appointed by the Limpopo Education Department to distribute textbooks in that province which is completely untrue. It has been widely covered in the media that the department in fact, through its administrator, terminated the contract of the service provider which subsequently attempted unsuccessfully to sue the department.
The article is based on assumptions on the nature of the report to the President by the Presidential task team that has not been made public nor, in fact, shared with any person outside of the task team itself. The assertions in the article are presented as fact but are instead entirely based on conjectures which the journalist credits to “a highly placed source”, attempting to give weight and credence to the inaccuracies.
Moreover, the journalist has made slanderous allegations against the Director-General and his personal life, again based on fallacious inaccuracies and has presented these basic inaccuracies as fact, in order to give credence to the veiled accusations of corruption. The journalist goes so far as to state that the Director-General is married with a mother-in-law, both of which are completely untrue.
Further, it seems extraordinary that a so-called professional journalist made no effort at any stage to attempt to verify his story with the Director-General before publication and instead was allowed to string together a whole lot of errors as “fact” in order to give credence to his claims.
It is a matter of public record that the tender process for the workbooks raised by Mr Mkhwanazi was scrutinised by the Auditor-General and the Auditor-General found that the tender process was entirely above board. Equally the fact that the main company that won the tender bid was Paarl Media of which Lebone Group Holdings is a minor subsidiary is not even mentioned.
What is extremely disturbing is that the New Age has seen fit to publish an article on the front page of its newspaper that seems to want to pre-empt the President or to persuade the President to adopt a particular stance on the matter.
The department will await the findings of the Task Team Report and the President’s decision on the course of action. The department and the Director-General in particular remain committed to ensuring that the issue of textbook procurement in Limpopo is resolved and that all protocols and procedures are put in place to ensure that the situation does not arise again.
Enquiries:
Hope Mokgatlhe
Cell: 071 680 6849
Dr. Granville Whittle
Cell: 012 357 4500
