In his budget speech in Parliament on 27 February 2013, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan indicated further reforms to the public procurement system in South Africa with a particular focus on curbing corruption. He said:
Minister Gordhan delivering the 2013 budget speech
“Procurement and combating corruption
Mister Speaker, last year I said to this House that we will continually endeavour to increase the value which government receives for the money it spends.
Let me be frank. This is a difficult task with too many points of resistance! However, we have registered some progress. In the present system, procurement transactions take place at too many localities and the contracts are short term. Consequently there are hundreds of thousands of transactions from a multitude of centres. There is very little visibility of all these transactions. While our ablest civil servants have had great difficulty in optimising procurement, it has yielded rich pickings for those who seek to exploit it. There are also too many people who have a stake in keeping the system the way it is. Our solutions, hitherto, have not matched the size and complexity of the challenge. As much as I want, I cannot simply wave a magic wand to make these problems disappear. This is going to take a special effort from all of us in Government, assisted by people in business and broader society. And it will take time. But we are determined to make progress.
The process for setting up the Chief Procurement Office in the National Treasury has begun in earnest and I shall soon be able to announce the name of a Chief Procurement Officer. A project team seconded from state agencies and the private sector has identified four main streams of work, involving immediate remedial actions, improving the current system, standardising the procurement of critical items across all government and the long-term modernisation of the entire system.
Among the first initiatives of the CPO will be to enhance the existing system of price referencing. This will set fair value prices for certain goods and services. Secondly, it will pilot procurement transformation programmes in the Departments of Health and Public Works, nationally and in the provinces.
National Treasury is currently scrutinising 76 business entities with contracts worth R8.4 billion which we believe have infringed the procurement rules, while SARS is currently auditing more than 300 business entities and scrutinising another 700 entities. The value of these contracts is estimated at over R10 billion. So far 216 cases have been finalised resulting in assessments amounting to over R480 million being raised. The Financial Intelligence Centre has referred over R6.5 billion for investigation linked to corrupt activities.
I fully support Minister Sisulu’s call for appropriate curbs on officials doing business with government. I will complement her initiative by aligning the Public Finance Management Act with the provisions of the Public Service Act.”
These remarks confirm the impression created by the draft Treasury Regulations published late last year, which, in the part dealing with supply chain management, seem to suggest a move back to a more central controlled procurement approach.
