FOUR YEARS AFTER STATE CAPTURE REPORT, SOUTH AFRICA’S PROMISED ANTI-CORRUPTION WATCHDOG REMAINS UNBUILT
The Public Procurement Act 2024 carries a status line that tells the whole story: “Commencement: To be proclaimed.” More than a year after President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the legislation in July 2024, the Act has not been brought into force. Treasury published draft regulations for public comment this year, extending the consultation period into July, yet the government’s official legislation page shows no movement.
That delay matters for a specific reason. The Act itself sidesteps the core recommendation made by former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo. Rather than creating a standalone anti-corruption body, the legislation established a Public Procurement Office within National Treasury. That office will promote compliance, develop integrity measures, advise procuring institutions, maintain supplier information and monitor procurement. It does not possess the investigative and enforcement powers Zondo envisioned for a dedicated Public Procurement Anti-Corruption Agency, one that would continuously analyse tenders, detect suspicious patterns and disrupt corruption before billions vanish into looted contracts.
Four years have now passed since the Zondo Commission delivered its five-part State Capture report, implicating nearly 1,500 people in the systematic looting of South Africa’s state-owned enterprises. The machinery of accountability has stalled. The National Prosecuting Authority’s Integrated Task Force is working through 218 criminal investigation recommendations from the commission. As of last year, only about one-fifth had been finalised or enrolled for trial. Just over half remained under active investigation.
The results on the ground reflect that pace. Four state capture-related cases have produced guilty verdicts. The government has recovered close to R11 billion in stolen public funds, a fraction of what was looted and, as Zondo notes, none of it touching the major matters that should have reached court by now. The R5.6-billion Prasa/Siyangena scandal, in which contracts were awarded to Siyangena while bypassing normal competitive procurement, sits in limbo. Prosecutors reportedly have a detailed roadmap, but no charging decision has been made.
Institutional turmoil at the top has compounded the delays. Shamila Batohi’s seven-year tenure as National Director of Public Prosecutions ended in 2025 after a string of setbacks, including the collapse of charges against former minister Zizi Kodwa and the NPA’s failure to extradite Gupta brothers Atul and Rajesh from the United Arab Emirates more than three years after their arrest in Dubai. Her successor, Andy Mothibi, assumed office while facing a legal challenge to his own appointment and the same backlog of unresolved state capture matters. He has pledged to accelerate prosecutions and asset forfeiture. Whether that translates into courtroom results is the question his tenure will be judged by.
Zondo’s frustration with these delays surfaced at last month’s Integrity as a Competitive Advantage conference in Sandton, hosted by the European Union’s Enhancing Accountability Programme’s Technical Assistance Facility, the Swiss Chamber of Commerce (Southern Africa chapter) and Good Governance Africa. He was direct. “We need leaders who are able to make decisions reasonably quickly,” he said. “If a corrupt person continues in his position, the message it sends is ‘we don’t care about allegations of corruption, or findings of a commission.’”
A procurement law without a standalone anti-corruption agency sends a similar signal, he suggested, one that treats prevention and detection as an afterthought rather than as architecture built into the system itself.
The demand for such an agency is not new. In 2011, the Constitutional Court ordered Parliament to establish an independent anti-corruption body meeting international “STIRS” standards: specialised, trained, independent, resourced and secure in its tenure. South Africa instead assembled a patchwork of existing institutions. The Hawks, the Special Investigating Unit, the Asset Forfeiture Unit and the National Prosecuting Authority all operate without the structural independence the court demanded.
By contrast, one institution has demonstrated what urgency looks like in practice. The Madlanga commission, investigating corruption and political interference in the criminal justice system, moved from testimony to arrests in a matter of months, including senior police officers implicated in a R360-million tender scandal. That speed shows the machinery can move when political will exists.
Private sector voices at the Sandton conference pressed the point further. Dr Max Burger-Scheidlin of the International Chamber of Commerce (Austria) argued that corruption corrodes even those who benefit from it, since criminal proceeds require a lifetime of evasion that clean money does not. Karam Singh, who leads Good Governance Africa’s anti-corruption advocacy, pointed to the absence of adequate monitoring tools, including Corruption Watch’s Procurement Watch system, as a structural gap that lets red flags go unnoticed. Wayne Duvenage of OUTA noted that King V now requires directors to demonstrate, not merely claim, corruption-free conduct, backed by measurable tools and a public database of suppliers who fail to meet ethical standards.
Zondo offered his own suggestion to business: establish whistleblower funds controlled by the private sector itself, not government, precisely because the government’s track record on follow-through is the problem.
The pattern is now familiar. Commissions produce damning evidence. Government commits to reform. The institution capable of enforcing that reform in real time never quite gets built. Fourteen years after the Constitutional Court first ordered it, the agency does not exist. The more pressing question now is whether Andy Mothibi’s NPA, working through a backlog that has barely moved, can deliver enough courtroom results to make the absence of that agency matter less.