COSATU urges Parliament to strengthen and expedite the long awaited Public Procurement Bill
14 September 2023
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) urges Parliament to strengthen and expedite the long-awaited Public Procurement Bill. This is a long overdue progressive bill that will lay the foundation for a single public procurement system across the entire state, e.g. departments, municipalities, entities and State-Owned Enterprises.
Currently there is no single public procurement legislative framework and as a consequence, the situation in many state institutions is akin to something from the wild west. The existing legislative gaps were brought to a fore in 2022 when the Constitutional Court declared that Treasury lacked the legislative powers to set local content and Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) public procurement criteria.
The Zondo Commission heard countless evidence of how our leaky public procurement systems enable industrial scale corruption and wasteful expenditure.
COSATU engaged extensively with Treasury on the Bill at Nedlac. We are pleased we reached consensus on many key interventions and the majority of the Bill’s provisions. Our support for the Bill is premised upon its: