Empowering public procurement offices is crucial: BBC

The Black Business Council (BBC) says empowering the public procurement office is crucial to preventing corruption following the signing of the Public Procurement Bill into law.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has signed legislation to create a single framework regulating public procurement, including preferential procurement, by all organs of state, aiming for efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and integrity.

The Bill seeks to enhance transparency and integrity, combat corruption, and ensure effective use of public resources while advancing transformation and broadened economic participation.

BBC CEO Kganki Matabane says the act will also help accelerate economic transformation.

Matabane states, “South Africa, for the entire world, consumes most of the HIV medication because the majority of the people who are HIV positive are in South Africa. But we don’t manufacture the medication here in South Africa, because there’s no enabling legislation. So we are busy creating jobs in other countries, like India and China and so on. But now that there’s legislation, if for example as the Black Business Council we feel that the government is not implementing or localising enough, we can even take the government to court to say you are implementing your own laws. But we couldn’t do that previously because there was no legislation to back us.”