12 Aug 2015

All ministries are required to publish their procurement plans extensively in order to increase accessibility to tender opportunities, says the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Board (PPADB) chief executive officer,

Briefing a delegation from the Gambia Public Procurement Authority, who were on a benchmarking mission in the country, Ms John said “this should improve competition and reduce over dominance by some contractors.”

She noted that all ministries were required to publish their procurement plans on their websites, the government portal and the PPADB website in order to increase accessibility to tender opportunities.

Ms John added that there was need to educate the public and stakeholders on public procurement in order to close loopholes that may attract corruption.

The delegation was also briefed on an array of issues among them the legal and regulatory framework, the procurement information system, procurement policy and operations, appeal mechanisms, disposal of assets and the training strategy.

Ms John told the delegation that they were in the process of automating all their procurements in order to speed up the process.

Ms John added that the country works hard to govern resources, noting that the country was facing unreliable rainfall which has caused water crisis.

The PPADB chief executive officer told the delegation that they were responsible for central government procurements unlike in Gambia where the procurement authority was also responsible for parastatals.

Ms John said they were experiencing limited participation of international bidders in major projects.She noted that the country  uses the open domestic bidding, adding that procuring entities were required to seek authorisation from the PPADB before engaging in restricted bidding.

Ms John also noted that there were preference schemes for citizen owned and locally based contractors and manufacturing companies. She named some of them as the Economic Diversification Drive (EDD), Citizen Economic Empowerment Policy and Local Procurement Scheme.

The Gambia head of delegation, Mr Tumbul Danso said the PPADB has a good track record which prompted them to come and benchmark in Botswana.

He said Botswana was known to be consistent in many sectors as it continues to be cited by many countries for its public sector.

He said they face many constraints some of which were beyond their scope such as corruption, adding that it was  investigated by other organisations.

He said some of their procurements were confidential, and they could not ask anything.

Mr Danso said the issue of citizen empowerment was questionable and a challenge requiring attention due to the fact that some citizens front as company owners when they were not. BOPA