South Africa needs new tools to win the war against tender corruption

THE scale of procurement corruption in South Africa is staggering. Whilst we have made progress in rebuilding institutions like the South African Revenue Service and removing ourselves from the Financial Action Task Force grey list, the reality is that corruption in public procurement remains deeply entrenched, sophisticated, and extraordinarily damaging to our economy and society. There is even speculation that Covid exacerbated the problem by exposing weaknesses in the State and emboldening other fraudsters to broaden the looting.

- Solly Phetoe

We must act because corruption poses an existential threat to our democracy, our development trajectory, and the livelihoods of millions of working-class South Africans, society, businesses and the entire economy who depend on functional public services.

Behind every Rand stolen from public procurement is a hospital not working, a school overcrowded, a road not maintained, a community left without clean water, critical vacancies that cannot be filled, jobs that are lost, and our people robbed of hope. Workers and the poor pay the ultimate price for procurement corruption.

During the development of the Public Procurement Act at Nedlac and Parliament, Cosatu argued that we needed better and stronger tools to tackle corruption. Whilst we won many critical tools in the Act, including some to push back against corruption, we did not win anything to decisively land hammer blows on this threat to our body politic.

TRANSPARENCY

Yet vested and corrupt interests are not sitting idle. They are ruthlessly defending their pillaging schemes and patronage networks with dangerous weapons such as violence, assassinations and intimidation to win contracts and terrorise investigators and whistle-blowers. They abuse legal processes to delay justice; they infiltrate political and social formations to shape power in their favour. Against this onslaught, our current legislative tools offer us sticks and knives. We need bazookas.

This is why during our engagements on the Public Procurement Act at Nedlac, Cosatu proposed to ban politically exposed persons and their immediate family members from government procurement, and to legislate a whistleblower incentive to reward those with inside knowledge of procurement corruption who come forward, provide evidence and help expose and collapse the systemic abuse of public money.