Please find English and Afrikaans soundbites by Jan de Villiers MP.
Today, the DA Western Cape government won a major Constitutional Court victory, standing up to bad national legislation – and the DA government won.
The Constitutional Court has upheld the Western Cape Government’s challenge to the Public Procurement Act and declared the legislation unconstitutional and invalid.
The DA believes that government procurement must start with getting the best possible value for the public. We want more competition, more capable businesses competing for government work, less red tape and a procurement system that rewards companies for actually creating jobs, developing skills, supporting small businesses and expanding opportunity.
We reject the idea that transformation requires government to sacrifice value for money or build ever more complicated rules around who may compete for public contracts.
The Western Cape Government has demonstrated that these are not competing objectives: more than half of provincial procurement spending already goes to black-owned businesses without mandatory set-asides or compulsory subcontracting.
That is the DA difference: transformation through opportunity, competition and growth – not transformation through a government tick-box.
The DA also believes that decisions about spending should be taken as close as possible to the people affected by them. A capable municipality or province should not have to ask National Government how to buy every bus, build every road or procure every service. National government should set fair constitutional rules, but it should not suffocate functioning governments with a one-size-fits-all system.
The DA Western Cape Government went to court because it believed this legislation crossed that line and because Parliament had failed to properly consult South Africans after material changes were made to the law.
The Constitutional Court has now upheld the constitutional challenge.
For the person standing at a broken traffic light, waiting in a clinic queue, driving over potholes or waiting for a leaking pipe to be repaired, procurement can sound like an abstract government word – but the laws and rules of procurement determine how your taxes are turned into the services you use every day.
When government pays too much, you get less, and when competition is restricted, you get fewer choices. This is why the DA government challenged this law, and it won.
That is what the DA is fighting for: a government that treats every rand as if it belongs to the hardworking South African who earned it.
The DA is proud that it was a government which took that fight all the way to the Constitutional Court and won.