The Gauteng Department of e-Government awarded Vumacam contracts worth R140,589,760 for access to its CCTV camera network.

The department previously indicated that it awarded a contract worth R78,629,760 to Vumacam for access to 6,000 cameras across Gauteng’s urban centres, starting from 1 February 2024.

It later disclosed that it awarded a further contract valued at R61.96 million to Vumacam, effective from 1 April 2026, for access to 7,271 cameras.

These details were included in a Democratic Alliance (DA) statement on how e-Government spent R1.38 billion during the 2025/26 financial year on outsourcing services without delivering any real value for money.

The DA had asked the Gauteng Provincial Legislature for a list of e-Government’s 100 largest suppliers by total value of payments.

It should be noted that the DA did not lump Vumacam under services which do not offer value for money. The DA mentioned them because Gauteng e-Government had confused Vumacam with Azure.

The DA said that the latest reply it received from the department described a R78.6-million contract with Microsoft Azure to lease 6,000 cameras. This clearly referred to the Vumacam contract.

“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?” the DA stated.

In addition to Gauteng facing criticism for its apparent inability to properly account for its spending, Premier Panyaza Lesufi is under scrutiny for the province’s expenditure on crime-fighting technology.

On Friday, Ekurhuleni NGO Bopha Foundation issued a letter of demand requesting that the Office of the Premier demonstrate that Gauteng’s technology investments were adequately addressing crime.

This was after the bodies of nine women were discovered in Ekurhuleni in the past two months, with five bodies found in the last week in a spate of potentially connected killings.

According to the Bopha Foundation letter, shared by anti-crime activist Yusuf Abramjee, the request has been made under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA).

MyBroadband contacted the Gauteng Provincial Government for comment about the letter, but it had not responded by the time of publication.

Billions spent by Gauteng on tech to fight crime

“Residents have repeatedly been told that technology, surveillance, command centres, wardens, patrol vehicles, helicopters, drones and emergency response systems are changing the way crime is fought.”

“The moment has therefore arrived for the province to demonstrate the difference between announcing a safety system and having one that works.”

The Bopha Foundation said that claims of rolling out extensive technology-enabled safety initiatives are often accompanied by “substantial public expenditure.”

“If the cameras work, show the public the evidence. If the vehicles are patrolling, account for their deployment. If the aircraft are operational, account for their use,” the foundation said.

“If the panic button system is effective, publish the response data. If contractors failed, identify the failure and explain the consequences.”

The foundation said the public deserves to know whether any part of the crime-prevention system exists only in procurement records and announcements rather than on the streets.

“The deaths of these women must not be reduced to political theatre, nor should they be used to draw conclusions that properly belong to investigators and the courts,” it said.

“Neither should they pass without forcing a serious examination of whether the public safety systems created in the name of Gauteng’s residents are delivering what was promised”

The foundation has requested that Lesufi and the provincial government provide factual information about the procurement, deployment, functionality, and outcomes of the safety technology initiatives.

“The women of Ekurhuleni do not need another assurance that they are safe. They need to know what has been built to protect them, whether it works, and what is being done where it does not,” it said.

DA also demands answers

The DA has also demanded answers from the Gauteng government following its response to questions about the costs incurred on its largest projects.

“It raises the question of whether the e-Government department has sufficient internal skills and capacity to fulfil its mandate of driving digital transformation across the public service,” the DA said.

“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 DA said that the e-Government department’s confusion of the Vumacam contract with a Microsoft Azure bill raised other concerns.

“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 R1.38 billion total the DA mentioned in perspective, spending for these services amounted to approximately 71% of the department’s entire annual budget of R1.94 billion.

One of the largest single payments disclosed was R642.6 million paid to the State IT Agency (SITA) during the 2025/26 financial year.

“The department’s own difficulties with managing these contracts make the scale of this expenditure even more concerning,” the DA said.

It requested assurance that other suppliers and contract information provided by the Legislature have been verified.

“Gauteng cannot continue pouring billions of rands into ICT without being able to demonstrate that residents are receiving value for money,” it said.

“Taxpayers are entitled to know exactly what they are receiving for their money.”

Source: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/government/668217-richest-province-in-south-africa-spent-r140-6-million-to-access-7271-cctv-cameras.html