A contractor gets a subcontract. A set-aside opportunity lands in the right hands. A development programme opens its doors. On paper, this looks like transformation. In practice, it’s often just access – a door held open for one project, then closed again.
That’s the distinction sitting at the heart of the Draft Second Edition of the Standard for Uniformity in Construction Procurement, now open for public comment. And it’s the distinction the South African Institute of Black Property Practitioners (SAIBPP) wants government to confront before this Standard becomes law.
The uncomfortable question
Version 2 arrives with better governance architecture, clearer accountability lines and alignment with the Public Procurement Act of 2024. All welcome. But better plumbing doesn’t answer the question that matters: what problem is this edition actually solving that the last one didn’t?
Because the mechanisms aren’t new. Unbundling contracts, targeted development programmes, subcontracting requirements. All these existed in the previous Standard too.
And the results speak plainly. In June 2025, the Deputy Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure reported that fewer than 36% of contractors in Contractor Development Programmes ever progressed beyond their starting grade. Payment delays. Funding gaps. Fragmented support.
A year later, the cidb was still asking the same question it should have already answered: are contractors actually growing, or just cycling through participation without ever graduating from it?
If a mechanism has existed for years and the progression numbers still look like this, carrying that mechanism forward unchanged isn’t reform. It’s repetition with better formatting.
Why discretion is the quiet killer of transformation
Look closely at the language in clause 5.6.1, and a pattern emerges: preferential procurement applies where it’s “possible”, where it’s “permitted”, where an individual procuring entity has chosen to provide for it in its own policy. That’s not a national floor. That’s a postcode lottery dressed up as uniformity.
A Standard built to create consistency across organs of state cannot simultaneously leave its most consequential transformation levers to local discretion. Entities should be free to exceed a minimum. They shouldn’t be free to avoid one.
The grading trap
The Standard’s strongest indirect-targeting provisions kick in only for Grade 7 and higher contractors.
This is precisely the tier where emerging, black-owned enterprises are least concentrated. The temptation is to frame this as a threshold problem: just lower the bar.
But that misses the real fault line. The question isn’t where the door sits. It’s whether there’s a staircase leading up to it. Without a credible, monitored pathway from lower grades into larger, more complex work, adjusting the threshold just moves the exclusion zone but it doesn’t remove it.
Guarantees, bonds, and the arithmetic of exclusion
Performance bonds of 5–12.5%. Retention of up to 10%. Professional indemnity insurance set at a procuring entity’s discretion. Individually, each is a reasonable risk tool. Stacked together, and layered onto payment delays the cidb has already acknowledged, they form a working-capital gauntlet that emerging enterprises – disproportionately black-owned – are least equipped to run. Risk management that ignores differentiated financial capacity isn’t neutral. It’s structurally selective.
What SAIBPP is actually asking for
Not more mechanisms. Better ones, with teeth. A non-negotiable national floor for preferential procurement, not a discretionary ceiling entities can quietly avoid. Standardised thresholds instead of policy-by-policy variation. Scaled guarantee requirements that don’t punish enterprises for being smaller. And, this is the one that matters most, real monitoring: who gets the opportunity, at what grade, whether they get paid on time, whether they progress, or whether they simply cycle back into the same development programme next year.
Because that last point is the whole argument in miniature. A procurement system can move a lot of money through black hands and still fail at transformation, if none of those hands ever grow independent of the programme that put money in them.
The test this Standard should be judged against
Not whether Version 2 is more sophisticated than Version 1. Whether, five years from now, more black-owned property and construction businesses are competing for complex work on their own footing, not because a set-aside carried them there, but because the system built the staircase and let them climb it.
South Africa doesn’t have a shortage of procurement mechanisms. It has a shortage of mechanisms that let go of the businesses they were meant to grow. Version 2 is a chance to fix that. Whether it does depends on whether “transformation” survives contact with a clause that starts with the word “may”.
* Kululwa Muthwa is the CEO of the South African Institute of Black Property Practitioners (SAIBPP)
ABOUT THE SAIBPP: The South African Institute of Black Property Practitioners (SAIBPP) is a professional association dedicated to driving transformation, investment and greater black participation across South Africa’s property sector and built environment.
Article originally published on The National
