Prez. Mahama squanders GHc7.8bn

• Posted on November 23, 2016
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

The ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) government would have saved the nation a whopping GH¢7.8 billion if most of the contracts it awarded since 2010 went through competitive tendering, the Executive Director of the Danquah Institute, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, has revealed.
In 2016, for instance, majority of the contracts awarded and approved by the Board of Public Procurement Authority were done on a sole sourcing basis, with the rest being awarded on a restricted tendering basis.
That trend even prompted a meeting in June, where board members of the Authority spoke on the need to channel contracts through competitive tendering processes. However, that never saw the light of day.
In its assessment, the Danquah Institute has concluded that the attitude of “government towards procurement sought to encourage collusive arrangements and exclude citizen participation and participation by private entities from the procurement process.
Arguing that public procurement contracts appeared to be motivated more by corruption than development, Nana Attobrah stated that “the actual cost of the current situation is that we are throwing too much money at far fewer projects.”
He expressed conviction that the nation could have developed faster if only government had adhered to the public procurement law in the award of contracts.
The research, which uncovered the finding, also had it that the Ministry of Finance would require an amount of GH¢60 billion to service the national debt for the next three years.
But this heavy debt stock would have reduced “if proper value for money assessment were applied to the contracts, for which much of the GH¢112 billion national debt was incurred and the country could have been looking at probably having to service not more than 50% of the current debt stock.”
According to the Danquah Institute, the award of contracts during the reign of the John Mahama-led government showed “a blatant and total disregard to the plight of Ghanaians and the state of our economy and the insensitivity of the government by its failure to recognise the importance of value for money, the need to protect the public purse and the integrity of the tax system.”
The public policy think tank also posited that the value of the contracts awarded for various projects by the NDC government since 2009 had been excessive, without evidence of what those funds were used for.
“A case in point is the authorisation of the contract for the supply of 3,000 cartons of A.T. pesticide for GHc15,480,000 to ABP Ltd by Quality Control Company Limited (Cocobod). This was awarded on a sole sourcing basis,” Nana Atobrah said, adding that farmers could have received three and a half times more pesticides if the procurement was subjected to competitive tender.
In April 2016, he recalled, a contract awarded by Ghana Cocoa Board to the value of GHc134 million for the procurement of 64,000 bales of jute bags was also awarded on a sole sourcing basis.
“This breaks down into GH¢2,093.75 per bale. On the market, this could have been competitively purchased at GH¢500 per bale and the nation could have received four times more, in terms of value for money,” he remarked.
The award of five separate contracts totalling GHc222,305,115 in March 2016, by the Ministry of Power for the supply of LED street lights in Accra and Kumasi, (light emitting diode lamps) and other lightning accessories, which also went through the same process was not left out in the research.
The Ministry of Water Resource Works & Housing came into the picture of sole sourcing in May 2013, when it awarded a contract worth $39.9 million to Amandi Holdings Limited with the approval of the Board of Public Procurement Authority under the Sakumono Sea Defence project.
“The contract was awarded by virtue of section 40(1)(b) of the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663), which provides that “a procurement entity may engage in single-source procurement under section 41, with the approval of the Board, where there is an urgent need for the goods, works or services, and engaging in tender proceedings or any other method of procurement is impractical due to unforeseeable circumstances giving rise to the urgency which is not the result of dilatory conduct on the part of the procurement entity,” the Institute stressed.
The public policy’s concern here is that, it was wrong for the Public Procurement Authority to approve a construction of this magnitude under a certificate of urgency because it did not require immediate attention.
“When it became necessary for a sea defence wall to be constructed, the state could comfortably have undertaken a competitive bidding to select a potential contractor for the project,” Nana Attobrah said.
The full research work has been published on our website; www.thechronicle.com.gh

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