Competition, collaboration ‘sweet spot’ critical in public procurement policy

Some four years after the signing of the Local Procurement Accord, which sketches government’s intention to achieve a 75% localisation spend in the procurement of goods and services, Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel has described government’s greatest challenge in executing its local procurement agenda as maintaining a balance between competition and collaboration by players in the market. Accepting that private sector companies needed to collaborate on certain issues to, for example, ensure economies of scale, institutionalised localisation policies also laid bare opportunities for anticompetitive market behaviour, such as collusion, rent-seeking and price-fixing, he said.