[imagesource: The Daily Maverick]

Mascots can be hit and miss.

On the one hand, you get Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers mascot, who shot to international fame in 2018.

Conversely, consider Cape Town’s Day Zero fears, and the fact that the city rolled out Splash, a mascot so frightening that somebody was inspired to create a horror movie trailer.

As unpopular as Splash was, I would say that Pelo, the would-be mascot for our National Health Insurance (NHI) rollout, is actually far more terrifying, because of the circumstances leading to his creation.

That’s Pelo above, and he didn’t come cheap.

The Daily Maverick below:

According to documents we’ve obtained, Digital Vibes paid a local animation studio roughly R266,000 to create Pelo, a 3D Nguni cow character outfitted in a doctor’s coat and spectacles…

The DoH [Department of Health] ended up paying a grossly inflated price for the work. In an invoice submitted in February 2020, Digital Vibes first billed the DoH R800,000 for “animation 3D development”.

Another invoice from March 2020 included a further R300,000 charge with the same description.

In other words, Digital Vibes billed the department R1.1-million for an outsourced animation project that cost only R266,000. This translates to a massive 314% mark-up and netted the firm R834,000 in pure profit.

South Africans barely scoff at corruption figures that number in the mere millions, but this is just a drop in the Digital Vibes ocean, because everything comes with a massive mark-up that may as well go under the line item ‘corruption’.

The company, run by two of ‘special leave’ health minister Zweli Mkhize’s close associates, ultimately pocketed R150 million from the DoH.

The Daily Maverick’s investigation also showed a cash payment from Digital Vibes to Mkhize’s son, Dedani, and a car bought in his name.

When the story first broke, it became immediately obvious that our very own Department of Health, spearheaded by our very own Minister of Health, was helping people plunder funds in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

Of that R150 million, at least R23 million of this amount can be attributed to billings linked to NHI communications work:

The company also billed the DoH R600,000 for a “design and concept” and R500,000 for what it described on its invoice as the “look and feel” of its envisaged NHI work…

Apart from the first bill for Pelo the cow, this invoice included a R1.5-million charge for “data driven sentiment behaviour change on NHI”; “media monitoring – all platforms worldwide”; and “real time alerts”, among other items.

So they threw a bunch of buzzwords together on an invoice, fired it off, and voila, it was all paid up in no time.

I can hear creatives around the country gasp, as they recall all those times they had to wait a good two or three months before having their invoices settled.

Get a load of this one:

The company also charged the DoH R250,000 for “WordPress completion” (WordPress is a free, open source website tool); R200,000 for “raw video footage” and R150,000 for “placement of opinion pieces”, among other curious billings.

In one case, it appears the DoH actually paid Digital Vibes for having coffee with stakeholders from the medical industry.

During yesterday’s health department’s briefing to the portfolio committee on health, it also emerged that Digital Vibes actually scored a cool R35 million before the department approved their work.

In the final investigation report carried out by appointed forensic investigators, both the tender and the bidding process were found to have contravened the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA).

What does that all mean? In terms of justice, probably not much, because nobody ever seems to end up behind bars for these actions.

In terms of the taxes we pay each month, it’s obvious that we are being treated as a personal slush fund for self-enrichment, whilst a painfully slow vaccine rollout and the squandering of valuable time and resources leaves us staring down the barrel of a destructive third wave.

[source:dailymav]