31/07/2026
When "Take Me to Court" Becomes the Official Answer
In 2025, before the start of the government financial year, I submitted a tender to the Cape Winelands DM. Like every bidder, I understood the process: submit, wait, and trust that the institution would act within the timeframes it set for itself. The tender had a 180-day validity period. That period came and went.
I did what any reasonable bidder would do. Agree to a request by the municipality for an an extension. They requested a second extension. On the third round, instead of a decision, I received a cancellation.
A tender does not simply "lapse" on its own. Somewhere in that process, someone did not do their work. Deadlines were missed. Follow-ups were not actioned. A process that should have concluded in months was allowed to drift until it collapsed under its own delay, and then the collapse was treated as the outcome rather than the failure.
I raised this directly with the Municipal Manager. My question was simple: why do officials allow tenders to lapse, and will there be an investigation with consequence management for whoever is responsible? I did not get an answer. What I got, in closing, was this: "You are free to take the legal route."
I don't think the Municipal Manager fully considered what that sentence means. The "legal route" is not free. It is taxpayer money, the same public funds the municipality is meant to protect, being spent so that a public official can stand in court and defend a process that should never have failed in the first place. I would effectively be taking myself, as a taxpayer, to court.
There is something telling about a public official responding to legitimate accountability questions by pointing to the courts. It is not confidence in the institution's conduct. It is a way of closing the conversation without answering it. If you don't want to correct a failure that has been raised with you, you redirect the person to litigation. It costs the official nothing personally. It costs the public everything, money, time, and trust.
To me, that response was not authority. It was defeat, dressed up as procedure. An official who cannot explain why a routine process failed, and who cannot commit to any consequence management, is not managing an institution, he is presiding over its decline while the public pays for the privilege.
This is not an isolated frustration. It reflects a wider pattern: officials who allow processes to fail through inaction, or who quietly change rules mid-process when they don't want to appoint a particular service provider, and who then rely on the cost and difficulty of legal recourse to shield themselves from accountability. Ordinary taxpayers and small businesses do not have unlimited resources to litigate against institutions funded by their own taxes. That imbalance is precisely why officials feel safe pointing to "the legal route" instead of answering a direct question.
Public office comes with a duty to account for decisions, not to outlast the people asking questions. Officials who cannot manage basic processes, who cannot explain their own institution's failures, and who treat courtrooms as a deflection tactic rather than a last resort, are not serving the public. They are wasting it, its time, its money, and its patience.
If an official cannot do the job properly, and cannot even account for why it wasn't done, the honest step is not to hide behind litigation. It is to step aside.
