The collapse of the routine road maintenance tender by the South African National Roads Agency Ltd (Sanral) has left its accountability, not just its procurement, in question.
The R9.5bn maintenance tender was declared unconstitutional. Its CEO is leaving. The Hawks want 15 years of records. And the question now hanging over Sanral isn’t whether its procurement broke down — the agency has admitted that — but whether anyone will actually be held responsible for it.
South African construction and road maintenance company BCB Solutions and another firm, Botle Ba Afrika Roads, were unsuccessful bidders. They took Sanral to court, challenging its decision to award the tender to a panel of just 20 companies, consolidating work previously spread across about 251 contractors.
Judge Khashane Manamela set aside the tender and didn’t mince words: the agency’s conduct was “plainly dishonest, secretive and clandestine”, marked by delay and persistent noncompliance. Sanral, he found, furnished incomplete records, ignored judicial directives and capitulated only on the eve of the hearing. The ruling holds that Sanral breached section 217(1) of the constitution, which requires public procurement to be fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective. Manamela ordered Sanral to hand over the full record and to pay costs on a punitive scale, including two counsel.
The fallout was significant — Sanral’s outgoing CEO, Reginald Demana, admitted the agency was “ill-equipped” to run the panel system and said it would go back to issuing tenders individually through an open process instead. A separate Moneyweb investigation also uncovered apparent contraventions of the Public Finance Management Act tied to emergency procurement awards that bypassed competitive bidding, and a legal opinion found evidence of contracts being awarded to nonexistent or deregistered entities.
Demana has called Sanral’s decision to concede rather than fight the case in court “accountability, not corruption” and says the agency investigated itself and asked a judge to set aside its own tender. Whether the court’s findings support that framing is now a matter of public record.
What’s easy to miss amid the court case and Demana’s departure is that this has moved beyond an administrative failure. The Hawks’ directorate for priority crime investigation has subpoenaed Sanral for records on routine road maintenance contracts going back roughly 15 years, covering nine construction firms. Demana has been named in that subpoena.
Sanral says it’s co-operating and denies any raid on its premises, but the agency has also confirmed suspending three supply-chain management employees for gross misconduct and commissioning an outside law firm to investigate possible fraud — including claims that contracts went to nonexistent entities and that board-approved decisions were reversed while the CEO was on leave.
That’s a materially different story to the one Sanral told as recently as June, when it characterised the R9.5bn irregular expenditure figure as historical, predating Demana’s tenure, and pointed to a run of unqualified audit opinions as evidence nothing fraudulent had occurred. The subpoena, the suspensions and the external fraud probe sit awkwardly next to that reassurance.
Demana’s resignation is effective from August 31, and he insists he wasn’t pushed — he’s moving to the financial services sector for reasons unrelated to the scandal.
He leaves having overseen R53bn in tenders awarded in 2024-2025, 21,360 jobs created, the resolution of Gauteng’s e-toll debt, and an expanded R16.5bn borrowing limit. Sanral also credits him with major infrastructure progress on routes including the N2 Wild Coast road and the KwaZulu-Natal N2-N3 upgrades. Whether that record survives the routine road maintenance findings, or whether history remembers his tenure for the panel system he called the agency “ill-equipped” to run, is now largely out of his hands.
Liezl Groenewald, CEO of The Ethics Institute and co-founder of The Whistleblower House, argues the test isn’t whether Sanral’s leaders personally participated in wrongdoing but whether it built the controls, encouraged challenge and acted on warning signs. Corruption in procurement, she notes, rarely starts as a single criminal act — it grows through small exceptions that quietly become routine until irregularity is normal.
Outa’s Stefanie Fick goes further, calling Sanral’s admission a serious governance failure that can’t be waved off as an isolated administrative error. She wants an independent forensic investigation with published findings, disciplinary action against those responsible, recovery of losses where possible, and criminal referrals wherever fraud or collusion is indicated. Restoring public trust, she says, needs full disclosure and visible consequences — not just a promise that future tenders will be lawful.
The DA’s Chris Hunsinger is blunter still, describing the collapse as a wholesale abandonment of procurement law rather than a technicality and drawing a direct line to the R1bn Prasa (Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa) security tender scandal: rules bent until a court or a newspaper forces the issue, with accountability arriving only once the money is already spent.
Parliament’s transport portfolio committee, chaired by Donald Selamolela, says it will engage once Sanral formally tables the relevant information — which, as of now, it hasn’t. That leaves a gap: a court has ruled the tender unconstitutional, the Hawks are investigating, and the agency’s own board has flagged possible fraud, yet the parliamentary body meant to hold Sanral to account is still waiting for a report to land on its desk.
Sanral has scrapped the panel system entirely and reverted to open, individual tenders for both routine road maintenance and category two engineering consultants — the latter also set aside by the high court in June after a separate challenge. Incumbent contractors stay on until November 30 while new tenders are finalised; a handful have already gone out in the Western Cape and Northern Cape. Whether that deadline holds, whether the Hawks’ investigation produces charges, and whether Sanral’s promised “consequence management” produces actual consequences will determine if this becomes a genuine reset — or another entry in the pattern Hunsinger describes.
