Submission to the consultation on South Africa’s Draft General Procurement Regulations 2026
In 2024, South Africa passed a new Public Procurement Act following the findings of the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture. The Act aimed to consolidate fragmented procedures and processes to increase transparency, effectiveness, and efficiency for sustainable development.
Whether the ambition of the Act is realized depends on its implementation, and the Draft General Procurement Regulations released by the National Treasury are a vital step in turning ambition into practice and improved public financial management.
At OCP, we compared the draft regulations against the Act’s intent as well as good practices globally, including the UNCITRAL Model Procurement Law and its guide to enactment, UNODC guidance, and country examples of strong procurement legislation and regulation.
The draft regulations provide a strong starting point, and we welcome this step forward. To make sure the Act fulfills its ambition and rebuilds trust in the South African public procurement market, there are four critical gaps we urge the National Treasury to address.
1. A single, central online platform must be clearly created and provided for
We encourage the establishment of a clear statutory deadline for the central online platform to go live, and that institutional websites should be treated as a supplementary source, with interim mirroring of data published to the National Treasury’s eTender portal while the central online platform is in development. (Regulations 35 & 36, with a number of other mentions of “websites” that should include “central online platform” for clarity).
2. Use of electronic procurement and the central digital platform must be mandatory
At various points in the regulation, it is unclear whether all public procurement data must be reflected in the central online platform, or if publication to one of various agency or departmental websites fulfills the publication requirements. We have suggested ways to tighten this up and ensure there are no loopholes to avoid publishing to the central online platform.
This is important to ensure there is one single source of truth about how funds were spent to avoid confusion, fragmentation or ambiguity that creates the opportunity for actors to circumvent safeguards, and makes it more difficult for auditors to evaluate public financial flows accurately. (Regulation 19)
3. The priority data fields to be disclosed should be specified more clearly
As written, the regulations currently do not specify the data fields to be published in the central online platform. We believe it is important to include priority data fields in the regulation. More data can always be collected and published, but certain high priority information that is useful for monitoring the health of the public procurement market should not be optional, and recorded for every contract. We suggest a starting point of what a few of these fields should be, and that statutory deadlines are set so that these data are disclosed in a timely manner for meaningful use by relevant stakeholders. (Regulation 36)
4. A commitment to publish public procurement data as open data must be included
The Act mandates open data publication for public procurement data, but the regulations do not have a corresponding regulation on open data. As South Africa does not have a government-wide open data mandate, it is important to specify how the open data provision of the Act should be implemented, and to ensure these are aligned to wider national data governance laws and regulations such as the Promotion of Access to Information Act, the National Policy on Data and Cloud and the Protection of Personal Information Act. We believe this could be added as a new regulation after the current Regulation 36.
Without this specification, it’s possible that procuring entities will not share information in open formats which are timely, free of charge, machine readable, structured and standardized. Data quality is critical as the bedrock of all more advanced data analytics or AI applications that can generate valuable insights on the procurement market and monitor for red flags. Open data ensures that all stakeholders can access, download and use this data whether a company looking for bid opportunities or a civil society organization conducting public oversight.
We welcome the opportunity to submit our feedback, and look forward to reading the points our peers and other procurement experts from academia, civil society and the private sector have contributed to strengthen the regulations as we work together to support the modernization and reform of public procurement in South Africa.
Our full submission with suggested language and a list of further detailed recommendations can be found here.
