27 Feb 2013

Member of Parliament for Mahalapye West, Mr Bernard Bolele has requested government to consider privatising management of the guardian funds.

Debating the budget proposals for the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, Mr Bolele said privatising management of the guardian funds would ascertain that government was not burdened by its maintenance obligations.“It cannot be that funds are not collected by those due to them but failure to collect funds would continue to be a burden to those who have nothing to do with those funds,” he said.

The MP also proposed that government should establish a fund of funds so that all monies accrued would be outsourced immediately or on a periodical basis to fund managers, arguing that by so doing it would not only cut costs but also continued to develop the fund management industry. Furthermore, he agreed with the adjudication and award of public tenders to be devolved to procuring entities.

However, Mr Bolele said, government should look into reviewing the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act arguing that the act stipulated that all litigation arising from adjudication and award by ministerial tender committees and others shall be the liability of the board regardless of whether it was involved in such.

“If they are going to devolve everything and now become an oversight body clearly they should not be burdened with legal risks and fees for activities in which they played no great part,” he said. The Assistant Minister of Finance and Development Planning, Mr Vincent Seretse had earlier told Parliament that in an effort to enhance efficiency and accountability in public procurement, the Board was proposing to transfer all adjudication and award of tenders to procuring entities. That, he said would ensure that the Board effectively played an oversight role in procurement to address the concern on lengthy processes and expedite decision making.

The assistant minster had also said the Board continued to build capacity on public procurement by intensifying the training of procuring entities, committees of the Board and the bidding community on tendering.

That, he noted was to ensure accurate tender documents, good evaluation of tenders, good award decisions, and the receipt of good tender proposals that offer value for money on prioritised projects.

On the public services outsourcing programme, Mr Bolele was happy that it had started in hospitals and was now going countrywideHowever, he was of the view that government should look into designing cyclical maintenance programmes and outsource all immediately upon hand over so that they could be a monitoring programme in order to attend to repairs on time. The advantage of such a programme, he said was that the private sector would be capacitated.

He also argued that maintenance agreements for everything that government provided in public buildings would avoid cost overruns.

The assistant minister had reported that under the public services outsourcing programme; the feasibility report has been completed. Parliament heard that the ministry of health has started implementation of the five-year outsourcing programme for its facilities countrywide. 

A contract for laundry services  was reported to have commenced in January at Princess Marina Hospital and another laundry services contract was due to commence beginning of this month  at Nyangabgwe Referral Hospital.

Nonetheless, Mr Bolele commended the finance ministry for what he argued was a well-thought-out and good budget. Meanwhile, Parliament approved the proposed financial allocation for the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning totalling P891 355 870.

The amount comprises recurrent and development budgets of P718 587 870 and P172 768 000 respectively. Presenting the budget proposals, Assistant Minister Seretse told Parliament that the total budget for the financial year 2013/14 represented a decrease of P220.4 million compared to the total revised budget for 2012/13 financial year. BOPA