SA PHARMA TENDER RULES DEFY LOGIC

2,500 jobs. Six of the eight companies awarded South Africa's largest HIV medicine tender aren't classified as real local manufacturers at all.

Pharmisa (Pharmaceuticals Made in South Africa) laid this out to Parliament's trade committee this week, and the picture is worse than a slow decline — it's a procurement system actively working against the industry it's meant to protect. Using its own definition of "local manufacturer" — a company that invests in production capacity, imports active ingredients, and formulates in-country, not one that just repackages imports — Pharmisa found that most winners of the tender to supply South Africa's core HIV triple-pill contract don't meet that bar.

The fallout:
→ 2,500+ pharma manufacturing jobs lost in the past 18 months
→ Medicine shortages in the public health sector now at an all-time high
→ Pharmaceutical trade deficit widening, driven partly by rand depreciation and Middle East-linked fuel costs
→ Industry asked for a 1.73 percentage point Single Exit Price increase for 2026; got 1.47%
→ Chair Stavros Nicolaou says resolving this now depends entirely on a direct conversation with the health department

The health department pushed back days later, defending its procurement approach. But the tension underneath is structural: a government trying to reduce import dependence while its own tender scoring gives zero weight to whether a bidder actually manufactures here.
You can't build pharmaceutical sovereignty on contracts that keep rewarding the thing you're trying to move away from.