The Constitutional Court has declared the Public Procurement Act of 2024 unconstitutional and invalid. The unanimous judgment, handed down by Acting Justice Lister Nuku on Thursday, found that Parliament failed in its constitutional obligation to facilitate meaningful public participation when it made significant changes to the Bill.

The Act was signed into law in July 2024 but never brought into operation, so existing procurement legislation continues to apply.

The challenge was procedural rather than substantive. It targeted how the Act was passed, not what it does. The applicants were the Western Cape Government, the City of Cape Town, the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism and trade union Solidarity.

AmaBhungane told the court the public was given four hours to assess changes, including a completely reworked Chapter Four, and then two minutes each to present. The court found the Bill had been rushed, and while no reason for the haste was given, the record suggested Parliament may have acted carelessly to pass it before the 2024 elections.

Justice Nuku declined to suspend the declaration of invalidity, precisely because the Act had never come into force and existing law still governs procurement.

GroundUp has the fullest account of the judgment, including the court's observation about the timing of the 2024 elections. Business Day frames it as a setback for Treasury's centralisation plans. BusinessTech carries the parties' reactions, including Solidarity deputy chief executive Anton van der Bijl on the Act's race criteria and Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis on the red tape municipalities avoid. Worth noting that the court did not rule on the set-aside or race provisions at all. They fall because the whole Act falls, not because they were found unconstitutional.

If you sell to government, your position is unchanged. The Act was never in force, the draft regulations published in April are now moot, and the PPPFA framework you already tender under still applies. What has changed is the direction of travel.

Treasury spent years building a single centralised framework, and it is gone, with no indication yet whether government will redraft and restart the parliamentary process or appeal. For a supplier, that means the fragmented system stays, with different rules across national, provincial and municipal buyers, which is worse for compliance overhead but better for the municipalities that argued they need to move fast on water and electricity.

The wider lesson is one South African business should note: this is the second major piece of legislation this year where the process, not the policy, decided the outcome. Public participation windows are not a formality, and consultations like the SARS VAT modernisation paper are where the arguing actually counts.

You might also like our piece on the SARS VAT modernisation timeline, why South Africa's business regulation is more restrictive than China's, and the SAPS body camera tender now out for bids.

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