Public Procurement and Corruption in South Africa

Abstract Like many other countries, South Africa depends heavily on its public procurement system and faces persistent issues of corruption within that system. Its regulatory regimes for public procurement and for anti-corruption are nonetheless distinct. Despite knowledge of significant corruption in the final decades of apartheid, anti-corruption was treated as a secondary rather than a primary objective in the initial phase of post-apartheid reform and design of public procurement. Rules against corruption in public procurement have largely taken the form of criminal offences in the anti-corruption regime, and the form of administrative rules internal to government within the public procurement system, neither of which has been effective. The lack of attention to the overlap of these two regimes has created the potential for continued growth of corruption in public procurement. As a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as to the grand corruption termed ‘state capture’, the South African government has recently introduced several measures and strengthened institutions to address corruption linked to public procurement; these are more investigative and ad-hoc than systemic and preventative. Finally, we briefly describe and then examine the place of information technology in South African public procurement, particularly in advancing the anti-corruption goal.