Category Archives: News

In February 2020, the South African National Treasury published a draft Public Procurement Bill for public comment. APLU submitted detailed comments, which can be viewed here. APLU’s African Public Procurement Law Journal also published a special edition focusing on the draft Bill, which can be accessed here.

An updated version of the Bibliography on Public Procurement Law and Regulation has been published by the Public Procurement Research Group (PPRG) at the University of Nottingham under the supervision of Prof Sue Arrowsmith QC (Hon). The update covers materials up to the end of 2018.

APLU has been a collaborator on the development and maintenance of the bibliography from its outset in 2011 and again worked closely with the PPRG to update the African section of the 2019 bibliography.

The bibliography aims to list in a comprehensive manner reading in the English language on public procurement law and regulation. As such, it provides an invaluable tool for the study of public procurement law and provides an excellent starting point for any research project in this field of law. The bibliography is freely available at the link above.

APLU’s Sope Williams-Elegbe is the Vice-Chair (Africa) of the Debarment and Exclusions Subcommittee (the Subcommittee) of the International Bar Association’s Anti- Corruption Committee.

In cooperation with the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank Group, and Le Bureau de l’inspecteur general de la Ville de Montréal, the Subcommittee is conducting research into national suspension & debarment systems. To launch the survey, the Subcommittee on 18 March 2020 presented a webinar titled “The Global Exclusion Survey: A Look at Suspension and Debarment Systems from around the World.” Sope was one of the panellists on the webinar, a recording of which can be found here.

The survey can be accessed here.

APLU’s Sope Williams-Elegbe brought a public procurement perspective to deliberations on blockchain in Africa at the Blockchain Africa 2020 conference. She presented on “Public Procurement, Corruption and Blockchain Technology: A Preliminary Inquiry” at the conference held in Sandton, Johannesburg on 12 March 2020. More information on the conference can be found here.

The long-awaited South African draft Public Procurement Bill was published for public comment on 19 February 2020. One of the main aims of the draft statute is “to create a single regulatory framework for public procurement and eliminate fragmentation in laws which deal with procurement in the public sector”.  The draft Bill proposes a range of reforms to the South African procurement system, including

• the creation of a Public Procurement Regulator,
• repealing the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act and with it the entire current approach to preferential procurement, replacing it with a new, broad preferential procurement framework to be determined by the Minister of Finance by way of regulation,
• introducing a new remedies regime that includes reconsideration at entity level, provincial level and national level, with a standstill period, and a new Public Procurement Tribunal, which will have to be approached for review of procurement decisions prior to instituting judicial review applications
• explicitly regulating infrastructure procurement and PPPs, and
• replacing the current local government procurement rules (the Bill proposes repealing the entire chapter 11 of the MFMA).

Comments are open until 30 June 2020.

Details on the draft Bill can be found on the website of National Treasury.

On 22 January 2020, Sope Williams-Elegbe presented on the subject of “Public Procurement and Sustainable Development: A South African Perspective” at the  Southern Africa Law Teachers Conference, the gathering of all law teachers in Southern Africa, held in Skukuza, Kruger National Park.

CALL FOR PAPERS

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON

PUBLIC PROCUREMENT LAW AFRICA

The African Procurement Law Unit (APLU), Faculty of Law, Stellenbosch University, is pleased to announce the Call for Abstracts for the fourth International Conference on Public Procurement Law Africa. The Conference will be held on 11 to 12 August 2021 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Conference Theme

The Conference theme is Public Procurement and the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa: A Decade of Opportunity. The theme will address a range of critically important legal and policy issues relating to sustainable development and sustainable public procurement in Africa, in the ten year deadline to achieving the SDGs by 2030. The conference will examine the role of public procurement to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals; using public procurement to address the climate emergency in Africa, the integration between procurement and human rights issues such as modern slavery, as well as issues that present an obstacle to sustainable development such as corruption, weak institutional capacity and poor governance in the procurement context – all from a regulatory perspective. The conference will also consider the role that innovation and technology such as blockchain and AI can play in sustainable public procurement and regulatory issues pertaining to such innovation. Plenary speakers include some of the leading thinkers in public procurement in Africa and internationally, and the conference will feature numerous papers, and workshops presentations. We are inviting abstracts for paper presentations addressing the broad conference theme in any of these particular areas:

Note that abstract ideas that extend beyond these thematic areas but which are within the broad conference focus will also be considered.

Submit a Conference Abstract

Abstracts for the conference should be emailed to aplu@sun.ac.za and should be no more than 300 words. The deadline for submission is 30^th April 2021. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by 30^th May 2021. Full conference papers (of no more than 10,000 words, including footnotes) and presentation slides (no more than 12 slides) should be submitted by 1^st August 2021, for distribution to delegates. Please note that late abstract submissions will not be considered.

The best papers will either be published in an edited book collection (to be confirmed), or in the African Public Procurement Law Journal.

Important dates

Conference Details

To learn more about the conference, including speakers, session formats, venue, registration please visit www.africanprocurementlaw.org.

Inquiries should be directed to the organizers at aplu@sun.ac.za

Please note that the conference is an academic conference and we are unable to fund speaker’s participation.

 Prof Geo Quinot & Prof Sope Williams-Elegbe

Conference directors

Participants of the Public Protector’s Mpumalanga office.

APLU completed its four-year collaboration in 2019 with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the Office of the Public Protector of South Africa in training investigators of the Public Protector’s office in public procurement law. From 15 to 19 July 2019, Prof Geo Quinot and Prof Sope Williams-Elegbe travelled to Mbombela to conduct an intensive one-week training programme with investigators in the Public Protector’s Mpumalanga office. This was followed by the final session of the programme from 4 to 8 November in Polokwane where training was offered to the Limpopo offices. These were the 8^th and 9^th provincial offices to be targeted in this programme, which started in 2016 when the original programme was piloted at the Public Protector’s head office in Pretoria. The conclusion of this four-year project resulted in all investigators of the Public Protector’s Office having received intensive training in public procurement law.

Participants from the Public Protector’s Limpopo offices