Procurement processes are being overhauled
THE government’s procurement processes are being overhauled to assist state institutions to better fight abuse of its R800 billion-a-year budget for goods and services as well as fraud and corruption.
Willie Mathebula, the National Treasury’s acting chief procurement officer, told the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture yesterday that the Public Procurement Bill was waiting for cabinet approval and there was also a review under way of Treasury regulations.
He promised that both the bill and the review of Treasury regulations would soon be published for public comment.
Mathebula said the proposed new bill would also create the Office of the Procurement Ombudsman.
“It’s quite urgent that we finalise the process,” he said.
He believed this would lead to the professionalisation of state procurement.
The bill was at an advanced stage and would repeal or amend existing statutes, a process caused by the government’s recognition of abuses in its procurement processes, he said.
Mathebula warned that contract management needed to be strengthened and that contract variations were a very serious issue in the country.
“They create the so-called evergreen contracts and act as barriers to small businesses and black-owned companies,” he said.
At the height of the capturing of the state, several organisations and public figures sympathetic to the Gupta family raised alarm over Eskom coal supply contracts that lasted up to four decades.
Multinationals and other whiteowned companies were accused of
targeting Gupta-linked Tegeta, which scored a multimillion-rand coal supply deal with the power utility.
Mathebula said contract management was very much on the Treasury’s radar.
The Treasury veteran, who was the first witness to testify, also proposed a special tribunal to deal with criminal cases of abuse of procurement processes and that these transgressions should be classified differently. “If we don’t do so, the rot will continue. We must ensure that where we identify wrongdoing it is dealt with,” Mathebula warned.
Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, who is chairing the commission sitting in Parktown, Johannesburg, said the country needed to look at what made the procurement process vulnerable to corruption. “My view is that of corruption is committed through tenders.
“We must do whatever we can to reduce the possibility of corruption,” said Justice Zondo, who was appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier this year to head the commission following former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s State of Capture report and the North Gauteng High Court’s scathing judgment in December.