14 Nov 2022

Government remains committed to strengthening public procurement and setting new parameters to curb fraudulent behaviour to ensure optimal gains from the sector.

An Act to establish the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA), to provide for its functions and management of procurement works will help enforce good governance and reduce fraudulent conduct across the sector.

In an interview with BOPA on Monday, Public Procurement Regulatory Authority acting Chief Executive Officer, Ms Tumelo Motsumi said the decision by the government to have one law meant that councils, parastatals, land boards, and central government were to be governed by the public procurement act.

Ms Motsumi said this meant that the function of adjudication and awarding of tenders had been given to accounting officers; a transition that had dissolved PPADB, Ministerial Tender Committees as well as District Administration Tender Committees as previously mandated by the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal (PPAD) Act.

This shift will witness CEOs, Council, Landboard and Permanent Secretaries becoming overseers at parastatals, councils, land boards, and ministries respectively, she said.

Ms Motsumi said the development would see more jobs being created in the procurement space as legislated oversight and procurement units would be established at various governmental offices to work alongside the accounting officers.

This, she said was contrary to the previous Act which depended solely on the board and the ministerial committees to award tenders, citing that separation of roles had to be in place.

Moreover, Ms Motsumi said the government had established that over the years procurement activities were handled by people that were not professionals in the sector, hence a lot was not going as desired in the government procurement space.

“The government took a decision to professionalise the procurement field, and PPRA has been given the mandate to ensure that everyone that handled procurement is a professional,” she said.

Ms Motsumi added that professionalising procurement space was a big mandate which took into account a series of roles, citing that accountants had Botswana Accountancy Oversight Authority (BAOA) that was authorised to ensure quality in the accounting space.

Similarly, she said PPRA assumed the mandate to ensure adherence to professional conduct given the processes embedded and government properties engaged.

Ms Motsumi said that coupled with this, PPRA dealt with monitoring compliance and setting standards.  However, going forward government intended to withdraw the professionalisation directive from the authority and have it as a separate entity, she said. On other aspects, the Act introduced new methods of procurement that would ensure optimum beneficiation economically, she said.

Amongst the new methods, the government introduced negotiated bidding to allow project owners to discuss prices and terms directly with the general contractor of choice, she said.

Ms Motsumi said an unsolicited bidding process had been enacted to allow individuals to submit offers of their initiative without having been invited by the procuring entity to do so.

She said this would potentially encourage the innovative mind to come up with brilliant projects within the developmental landscape of the government; something that was not there in the previous Act.

The CEO said the authority was in active engagement to set regulations of how to unfold the new Act and its components. ENDS