Image: Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay. On 15 July 2026, Corruption Watch (CW) submitted formal written comments to Parliament's Standing Committee on Finance on the Draft General Public Procurement Regulations, released in April 2026. These are the regulations that will bring the Public Procurement Act of 2024 into full effect.
The submission is underpinned by more than a decade of CW's own experience of how procurement corruption actually happens in South Africa. Monitoring public procurement and advocating for reform of South Africa's public procurement system has been central to our work from the day we opened our doors – furthermore, integrity and credibility in public procurement is recognised as one of the six pillars of South Africa's National Anti-Corruption Strategy 2020 – 2030.
Our experience as an active member of the Procurement Reform Working Group since 2020, and our in-house research and analysis work allow us to aim our comments at the specific points where we have repeatedly seen public money drain away. The submission also draws directly on CW's litigation record. It cites the organisation's role in challenging the Seriti commission's findings on the arms deal (a challenge that succeeded, with the report set aside in 2019), its 2013 investigation into a scandalously inflated circumcision tender in Mpumalanga worth R128-million, and its involvement that same year in exposing the so-called construction cartel, which resulted in the Competition Commission imposing fines on 15 construction firms for collusive tendering.
This work is important because we and others know procurement is one of the highest-risk areas of government activity, and for good reason. It's the mechanism through which the state spends most of its money on goods, services, and infrastructure, which makes it a natural target for abuse and collusion with private sector players.
The constitutional foundation
The submission opens by grounding everything in Section 217 of the Constitution, which requires state procurement to be fair, equitable, transparent, competitive, and cost-effective. It goes on to link this to the broader democratic foundational values of accountability, responsiveness, and openness named in Section 1(d) and the public administration principles of transparency, efficiency, and impartiality listed in Section 195.
CW places great emphasis on the principles expressed in the Constitutional Court's landmark judgment for AllPay v SASSA (AllPay Consolidated Investment Holdings (Pty) Ltd and Others v Chief Executive Officer, South African Social Security Agency and Others 2014), a case in which CW itself appeared as amicus curiae together with the Centre for Child Law. The court's reasoning in that judgment aligns with CW's argument: procedural fairness and lawfulness in procurement cannot be assessed only by looking at outcomes, but must be assessed independently of those outcomes.
CW also invokes the findings of the Zondo commission, arguing that its central lesson was that corruption flourishes precisely where procurement decisions are made in opaque circumstances and where information about bids, evaluations, and contract performance/monitoring isn't readily available. This is the thread that runs through the entire submission: transparency isn't a nice-to-have when it comes to procurement regulation, it's the essential mechanism that lets oversight bodies, journalists, civil society, and the public catch problems before they escalate into another arms deal or construction cartel.
Where CW says the draft regulations fall short
The bulk of the submission works through specific clauses:
Transversal (whole-of-government) term contracts (Regulation 16): these are large, strategically significant arrangements, but the draft only requires publication of the final contract – not the needs assessment, rationale, anticipated beneficiaries, or draft framework that precede it. CW wants pre-award transparency, saying that would “facilitate meaningful stakeholder engagement prior to finalisation”.
Unsolicited bids (Regulation 18): the draft is vague on timing and duration of disclosure, which CW warns will produce inconsistent practice across institutions, instead recommending clear timeframes for publication, minimum periods during which information must remain accessible, and disclosure requirements at each stage of consideration, including reasons for acceptance or rejection.
Emergency procurement (Regulation 21): post-emergency reports aren't required to go to the Public Procurement Office, only to be published – this creates a gap in oversight, says CW, which must be closed.
Evaluation criteria (Regulation 24): another vague provision, making it unclear whether new entrants or emerging suppliers are exempt from standard evaluation criteria, and if so, what alternatives must be applied.
Bid validity and vetting (Regulations 26 and 27): CW flags that "voluntary" consent to extend bid validity periods may not be voluntary in practice if bidders fear consequences for refusing and feel compelled to agree.
Contract management (Regulation 29): here CW pushes for transparency not in terms of the publication of awarded contracts and variations, but rather around ongoing disclosure of performance. Are delivery targets met? What indicators are used to measure supplier performance? Is the expenditure commensurate with the contract value?
The organisation also warns against the dangers of "scope creep" and contract variations, saying the regulations are not strong enough in these areas.
Transparency and access to information (Regulations 35 and 36): CW argues these clauses lean too heavily on requests under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA), arguing rather that “while PAIA remains important, it is not an efficient substitution for proactive transparency and should function as a supplementary mechanism”.
Our view, then, is that procurement transparency must not be merely an abstract governance ideal or something that is performed erratically. It must instead be the practical and meaningful difference between corruption being caught early, or being caught only after a commission of inquiry, years later, has to laboriously reconstruct what happened, at great expense to the taxpayer. DM
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