New public procurement rules won’t stop corruption and will raise costs
Substantially more stringent and complex, they open up new avenues for graft – and instead of easing up on ‘transformation’, National Treasury is doubling down on it.
The set of new public procurement regulations proposed by National Treasury has a lot to say about who can bid for public sector contracts but pays less heed to the costs, nor does it seem overly concerned about the potential for corruption.
This is not a trivial debate, given the scale of public procurement – reckoned to be around R931 billion in 2022 or 15% of GDP, according to a 2024 report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Those figures are certainly higher by now.
