The DA's Brummer is quoted in Sunday Times of February 5, 2012 as having said that his reference to Jeremy Ord of Didata in his email to senior DA officials as a ‘supporter' was because the company did a "free assessment" of the municipality's IT system, and that "politics has nothing to do with [illegal awarding of a contract]".
He is also reported to have claimed that no tender was put out because the work was "an emergency". He ended his response by saying that the municipality is "paying [Didata] something like R4, 2million but every cent is accounted for down to the last safety pin."
The problem with Brummer, and the DA by extension, is that they think that they are intelligent while everybody else is stupid.
Brummer must explain what he meant by "free assessment" because there was none such a thing. Didata was asked by the DA to "look" into the system and give a quotation. This is confirmed by Thys Giliomee's Memorandum to Booysen wherein he states that after doing an assessment, Didata submitted the total cost implications of R11.9m.
The municipality tried to get funding from the province. After being unable to get provincial assistance, "further negotiations were held with Dimension Data (7 Dec 2011). Didata was then asked to revise their specifications, and "the quotation was received early on 9 December 2012 (sic)"
From these it is clear that Didata did nothing for free. They "assessed" the system in order to write a quotation. And they ended up getting an illegal contract.