South Africa’s trust infrastructure is failing, it’s time to rebuild the national quality infrastructure

This recognition fuelled the growth of global institutions like the ISO, of which South Africa was a founding member, and the elevation of national standards bodies as the bedrock of the modern trade system. In South Africa, the standards movement was forged in the demanding environment of deep-level mining, where the reliability of pumps, ventilation and explosives was a matter of immediate human and economic survival.

These disciplines evolved into a robust national capability in engineering, testing and quality management, becoming essential to our broader industrial competitiveness.

Fundamentally, standards reduce transaction costs by allowing buyers and sellers to trust that products and services conform to agreed specifications. Modern trade relies as much on this “trust infrastructure” as it does on physical logistics.

South Africa built something genuinely valuable and fundamental to our economic development prospects: a national trust infrastructure, comprising four interconnected institutions: the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), the National Metrology Institute of South Africa (NMISA), the National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications (NRCS) and the national accreditation body, Sanas.

The SABS develops standards. NMISA maintains the nation’s measurement standards. Sanas accredits laboratories, inspection bodies and certification bodies. The NRCS enforces compulsory specifications for products entering the South African market. Together they form the trust architecture that underpins industrial competitiveness, consumer protection and international trade.

That quality infrastructure is now being dismantled – not through a single decision, but through 15 years of legislative fragmentation, governance failure and systemic underinvestment whose cumulative effect is institutional collapse.

The SABS’s recent presentation to Parliament on the results of a forensic investigation will inevitably name individuals and identify wrongdoing. However, that investigation is a temporary luxury examining a symptom while the disease is structural and does not require reform, but total reconstruction.

The 2008 decision that started everything

Before 2008, the SABS was a unified institution. The compulsory standards function – including the Letters of Authority, which are mandatory pre-market approval documents that allowed products into the South African market – and the voluntary certification and testing function were integrated into a unitary organisation. The compulsory function generated the revenue that cross-subsidised standards development and laboratory investment. They depended on each other.

The 2008 legislation changes separated them into a new entity – the NRCS that took the compulsory function and with it the letters of authority revenue stream. The SABS retained the voluntary certification and testing function, alongside the legal mandate for developing national standards, but now without the financial engine that sustained it.

The separation may have been well intentioned – avoiding conflicts between regulation and voluntary certification – but the consequences were not fully understood.

The SABS lost its major revenue from the cross-subsidy of compulsory standards. And the NRCS – the regulator that determines what products enter the South African market – subsequently had its board removed, leaving it operating under a CEO answering directly to the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, with no independent governance oversight.

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse and Business Unity South Africa have been formally documenting this NRCS governance failure since 2021. Their findings are simple and damning, namely, that despite years of formal concern from industry, there has been little meaningful corrective action. A regulator issuing letters of authority – the gateway documents for everything imported into South Africa – without a board and without independent oversight is not a governance risk. It is a governance failure written into legislation and left there, possibly open to abuse.

The collapse inside the SABS

The financial hollowing of the SABS, situated on the same campus in Groenkloof, slowly gathered momentum after the 2008 reforms were passed. This initiated an internal institutional collapse that the forensic investigation is now examining without the context to fully understand what it is seeing.

The SABS laboratories are undercapitalised, technologically backward, and in many instances face skills retention and capability development challenges associated with years of underinvestment. Testing and certification have been organisationally split, destroying the cross-pollination that makes certification credible and innovative.

Most critically, the SABS appears to operate across multiple technology systems and platforms, creating challenges for integrated visibility and auditability, especially with regard to laboratory information management systems.

This means that no single person at the SABS can see the complete picture of what is happening across all laboratories simultaneously, or most importantly, what is happening to the customers testing samples while in the care of the SABS.

This transparency vacuum may create conditions in which improper influence, process manipulation or audit failures become more difficult to detect.

A terrible consequence of the 2008 decision to split into two separate organisations was that both the SABS and the NRCS continue to use an outdated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, called JD Edwards.

In RFQ 201880, issued in 2026, the SABS sought a service provider to deliver JD Edwards (JDE) functional support, maintenance and application-upgrade services for its JDE 8.12 environment. Because JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12 was originally released in the mid-2000s, the reference to version 8.12 suggests that the SABS may still be operating a legacy ERP platform whose core architecture dates back about 15 to 20 years, notwithstanding any subsequent patches, customisations, integrations or incremental upgrades.

Legacy enterprise systems do not in themselves cause cyber incidents. However, ageing platforms can increase operational complexity, complicate patching and integration and make cyber resilience more difficult to achieve.

The SABS’s technology environment has itself been identified as a challenge. Parliamentary submissions following the November 2024 ransomware attack, carried out by the Lynx Ransomware Group, acknowledged that recovery efforts were hindered by legacy systems and outdated technology.

The SABS might argue that annually its certification schemes, test officers and laboratories are able to pass muster with the external accreditation process.

Parliamentary records show that the SABS experienced a partial suspension of its cement accreditation scope between August 2024 and May 2025, a matter that received significant scrutiny from the Portfolio Committee on Trade, Industry and Competition. This, in a country with a massive infrastructure backlog.

Separately, the SABS was suspended by the Foundation FSSC 22000 from acting as an approved certification body under the FSSC 22000 food safety scheme between March and June 2021.

The market has already passed judgement, as confidence in the SABS’s ability to test and certify product samples has collapsed among those who depend on it most. Industries are increasingly building their own certification schemes to maintain trade viability. The cement sector, for example, has seen manufacturers pivot to independent, Sanas-accredited bodies like CMA Certification Services to secure the quality assurance required by contractors and insurers.

Similarly, in the solar water heating industry, where SABS testing requirements proved prohibitively cumbersome, industry bodies like the Plumbing Industry Registration Board and the Institute of Plumbing South Africa have prioritised installer-level compliance and training to ensure system integrity. These are not isolated workarounds; they are defensive, industry-led architectures emerging to fill the vacuum left by a failing national quality infrastructure.

The forensic investigation will not find what could not be seen. The fragmented technology architecture, an outdated ERP system, ensured that the full extent of what happened may never be known.

The loss of system visibility, combined with fragmented and ageing technology infrastructure, may have impaired the preservation, retrieval and analysis of digital evidence. As a consequence, there is a material possibility that certain events, transactions, decisions or system activities cannot now be fully reconstructed, regardless of the scope of any subsequent forensic investigation.

Why a forensic report cannot fix this

South Africa has a long history of forensic investigations in the public sector that produce findings and then are quietly absorbed without structural consequence. The SABS investigation will follow the same path unless the structural argument is made clearly before the report is used to close the conversation.

The investigation examines what individuals did inside a broken system. It cannot redesign the architecture that made their actions possible. Replacing leadership inside a structurally compromised institution does not rebuild the institution. It resets the countdown to the next failure which could be fatal.

What reconstruction actually requires

South Africa needs a rebuilt quality infrastructure, designed from first principles and governed as sovereign economic infrastructure. This requires an honest confrontation of the 2008 legislative split and an evaluation of whether a restored cross-subsidy model is essential for the SABS’s financial sustainability.

Immediate legislative amendments are necessary to restore independent board governance to the NRCS, followed by a unified “Quality Infrastructure Act” that brings the SABS, NRCS, NMISA and Sanas under a single, accountable and technologically integrated framework. The stakes extend beyond our borders.

The African Continental Free Trade Area promises a unified market of 1.4 billion people, a vision that relies entirely on credible, mutual recognition of quality standards. A rebuilt system would cement South Africa’s role as the continental anchor for these frameworks, securing our position in the next generation of industrial competition – from autonomous vehicles, AI and new mining equipment, to direct satellite communications and other new technologies.

South Africa’s trust infrastructure is a strategic asset currently in rapid decay. Once that trust is lost, it will take decades to recover. The ticket is expiring. Reconstruction is no longer optional. DM