PARI State Reform Programme
From Mexico to the Philippines, civil society oversight is complementing the work of formal oversight bodies, making citizens active accountability partners in public procurement. South Africa’s new Public Procurement Act, along the same line, has developed supply-chain oversight to include civil society as a partner in a function historically fraught with graft and inefficiency. The Act opens the door to an era of transparency of data and procurement processes and introduces the technology to support it. But will this partnership translate into better delivery, and what will it take to make that happen?
Billions of rands flow through the public procurement system in a year in South Africa. It is the state’s primary instrument for building infrastructure and delivering services. Through procurement, plans become the pipes for clean water, the roads for public transport and the support for local entrepreneurs. But the system, especially at local government, is often inefficient and subject to intense corruption pressures. Auditor-General (AGSA) data highlights how unfair and uncompetitive procurement practices, along with irregular expenditure, increase financial losses, non-delivery and fraud across municipalities.
In Joburg, the city is investigating 18 matters, amounting to over R3 billion, of rampant unauthorised, wasteful expenditure and other financial misconduct that gravely endangered the city’s residents, infrastructure and functioning. Among the most corrosive are irregular covid-19 contracts worth R18.6 million at the Johannesburg Property Company, where non-delivery and non-payment threatened critical billing systems and risked exposing residents’ personal data. AGSA has reported that in Johannesburg Water alone, payment delays have left contractors stranded and critical infrastructure projects stalled.
Local government is particularly mandated by section 153 of the Constitution to promote local economic development through its spending, and to prioritise communities’ basic needs in its administration and budgeting. Transparent and accountable procurement at local level is therefore key to unlocking this unique developmental role.
But given the scope of malfeasance, sufficient oversight of public procurement is challenging for bodies like the Municipal Public Accounts Committees. It is this conundrum that Public Procurement Act 28 of 2024 that has newly come into operation in 2026, seeks to address. While the Act currently faces court challenge and has been criticised on various grounds, its provisions for greater data transparency and civil society oversight are an opportunity towards a more effective and accountable system. This is fair justice for a system that has too long been hampered by fragmented procurement data systems and opaque practices, and that has been instrumental to municipal dysfunction.
The Act goes a long way to strengthen the Public Procurement Office, providing for a central online portal where procurement data can be publicly accessible and transparent. It mandates ‘standardised and interoperable open data across the procurement cycle’, and it explicitly empowers ‘the public, civil society and the media to access, scrutinise and monitor procurement processes’. The Act thus recognises public oversight as a legitimate and necessary component of the system, transforming transparency from a passive principle into an active, participatory right.
This legislated potential for democratised, centralised procurement data will need regulatory support to manifest in a well-designed, collectively accessible portal. Regulations should promote open contracting standards that provide a common language for procurement data, allowing anyone to track a contract from its initial planning, through the tender process, to its final deliverables. Integrating this data with the new beneficial ownership register would reveal who ultimately benefits from public expenditure, turning complex information into a powerful tool for public insight and accountability.
There is already a move at national level towards using open contracting standards and increasing the amount of procurement data in the public domain. National Treasury’s Procurement Payments Dashboard for example, enables the public to explore government spending on goods and services. But the platform is not yet a full view – local government, for instance, is not yet included due to the multiple data systems operating at that level.
The Act creates previously untapped potential for civil society organisations to provide expert oversight over issues of national importance, like water infrastructure. To facilitate this, regulations could create a formal register of accredited CSOs to observe high-value tenders. Furthermore, regulations can empower communities through social audit mechanisms, enabling them to verify that delivered services match what was contracted by municipalities. We can draw practical lessons from existing pilots of community oversight such as the Asivikelane campaign. Their work shows that traditional transparency attempts on municipal websites often fail communities; residents frequently lack basic details, like the name of the service provider emptying their toilets or whom to contact when a service fails. Practical guides developed by organisations like Asivikelane help communities find and use municipal contract information and regulations could institutionalise such approaches. This turns transparency into a citizen-led verification activity and fosters a collaborative partnership for better delivery.
In several countries around the world, from Mexico to the Philippines, civil society oversight is complementing the work of formal oversight bodies – making citizens active accountability partners in public procurement.
Some may question whether this focus on transparency and public access could slow down the system or risk exposing sensitive information. There are, however, clear guardrails developed internationally for managing these risks, some of which we explore in our recent policy paper.
We need to think carefully about the practical mechanics of accountability. How do we protect whistleblowers who raise red flags? How do we ensure enforcement mechanisms are strong enough that those who identify problems are heard? And how do we empower communities, with real tools and access, to play a meaningful role in social audits? This is the difficult, granular work of translating a law into lived reality. By embracing meaningful transparency and public oversight we can bring real accountability to procurement, the space most vulnerable to corruption, and give flesh to the constitutional principle of participatory democracy at the local government level.
