PUBLIC POLICY INTERVENTIONS MUST ENSURE TRANSPARENCY, COMPLIANCE AND PEOPLE-CENTRED SERVICE DELIVERY

Legislation such as the Public Finance Management Act and the Municipal Finance Management Act have not curtailed misconduct, waste, and irregular expenditure. Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar looks at the importance of public policy interventions strengthening transparency, compliance and community-centred service delivery towards fighting corruption and enabling better fiscal choices.

The glare of accountability within a country’s public finances is often a fair assessment of the health of governance and internal controls. However, the auditing process does not always reveal the intricacies available to public officials that enables certain discretionary adjustments of “piggy-backing”, variations, deviations or expansions of existing contractual arrangements under the guise of public procurement. Critically, auditing has been highlighted over the past decade in South Africa as a crucial mechanism to hold the government accountable and protect the public fiscus and the taxes of hardworking citizens and residents.

The risk in South Africa, as it is elsewhere, is that the role of public procurement often intersects between politics, public interest and the available resources. It is not surprising that public procurement is usually redirected to meet the needs of very narrow interests that often do not align with the need for the strategic allocation of resources and best value for money that benefits both communities and the public purse. Like many other countries, South Africa has introduced a suite of supply chain legislation and regulation to manage and coordinate how public resources are committed effectively and ensure that our governments do not act irresponsibly or irrationally.

However, legislation in South Africa, such as the Public Finance Management Act and the Municipal Finance Management Act and various directives issued by the National Treasury, have not curtailed misconduct, waste, and irregular expenditure. South Africa has had to initiate a judicial commission to consider rampant corruption and the redirection of public resources to fulfil narrow interests that have flouted legislation and regulation. The broader question confronting reform in our public finances must also consider how legacy contracts are justified and how gaps within the existing framework should be strengthened to avoid the abuse of procurement and supply chain processes.

The process of how public resources are gathered, directed and spent is not simply a matter of proper framing of our public policy position. Instead, this is a sacred and custodial responsibility between citizens and their government. The responsibility should be a legal, moral and social contract, and these should be the principles applied to all public policy interventions. Accordingly, it requires a deep consideration of how resources are allocated and how projects are managed within the public square. Reform is urgently needed beyond the issues that South Africa’s State Capture Commission will identify. Such reform will need to consider strengthening the Auditor-General and relevant treasury departments’ investigating powers to ensure that public funds are utilised responsibly and sensibly at all times.

Our focus, for now, has often fallen on the more noteworthy delinquents such as EOH, one of the largest technology services companies in Africa. They continually appear in the media around contractual arrangements in Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest metro and malfeasance and circumvention of supply chain regulations and guidelines. The heightened awareness must spark a deep consideration by entities such as Parliament and the Auditor-General to consider appropriately tightening existing legislation and regulation. The National Treasury must begin to coordinate efforts within provinces to review all procurement that currently reflects any balance sheet.

Proper consideration and leveraging principles of transparency and accountability will likely reveal a suite of contractual arrangements between the public sector and the private sector that does not live up to the standards of fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective procurement. We will unravel contracts that have been extended monthly for more than a decade and arrangements that are necessarily achieving the strategic outcomes that require the proper and appropriate allocation of public resources. The work in South Africa is not unique, but importantly how we shift the scales towards more equitable, transparent and effective public spending can be used as a model in public policy interventions for the public square in the Global South.

South Africa must consider how transparency can be strengthened and how legacy contracts are being identified and rationalised. Various provincial and local governments across South Africa have committed hundreds of millions for goods and services, with the role of consultants on a very tenuous contractual basis that does not align with the purpose, purport or ambit of legislation or regulation. South Africa’s Constitution stipulates that procurement must occur under a fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective system. Instead, governments have opted to deviate, expand, and use creative accounting, logic, and legal gymnastics to extend contracts far beyond their compliance with our constitutional mandate.

The failure to address this public policy crisis will continue to see hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money going to consultants and service providers. These parties might not be committing criminal activity but are benefiting from avoiding proper compliance with the constitutionally mandated requirements to ensure that public procurement is transparent, equitable, fair, competitive, and cost-effective.

Public policy interventions must ensure a more resounding commitment to compliance. Firstly, with the letter and ambit of the law. Secondly, they must ensure that the exercise of public power must be rational and aligned to the fulfilment of service to people and the community. Our approach in shaping public policy and reform efforts must be rooted in service to citizens and communities, abiding by a higher standard that moves far beyond compliance and seeks to address injustice in all its shapes and forms.

- Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar