From Pravin Gordhan’s budget speech, 17 February 2010

Measures to combat fraud and corruption
A major site of both wastage and inefficiency is in our procurement system. Through
a combination of corrupt practices, inefficient procurement, poor planning and, in
some instances, collusion by the private sector, we are not getting the kind of value
from our purchases that our people deserve. Even where there is absolutely no
corruption, we sometimes give contracts to people who cannot implement them and
so houses are left without roofs, roads crumble when it rains; water schemes break
down and school books fail to get delivered.
Mister Speaker, corruption is an ever-present threat to our ambitions. All South
Africans must constantly and consciously work to root out this cancer. If we are to
address this scourge, we need improved management capability, governance,
enforcement, and oversight in government, and in the business sector. Poorly
managed tender processes are all too often open to such abuse. Greater
transparency and accountability in procurement systems will therefore be a key
focus of reform in the period ahead.
Additional funds have been allocated to bolster efforts to strengthen supply chain
management, and the relevant government departments have intensified efforts to
bring perpetrators of tender fraud to book. Data matching, the practice of comparing,
for example, taxpayer data with social grants registers or housing waiting lists, will
become a regular feature of a systematic approach to minimise abuse. We are
starting to see the early results of these efforts: officials have been disciplined and
others fired, five people linked to supply chain fraud were arrested in KwaZulu-Natal
last week and more cases have been handed over to the National Prosecuting
Authority. We are expecting more arrests very soon. An inter-ministerial committee
on corruption has been established, Chaired by Minister Chabane, to coordinate
government’s efforts to stamp out corruption.

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