In the wake of the passage of the 2015 budgetary allocations in the National Assembly and the apportioning of funds to the respective government ministries and departments, the National Procurement and Tender Administration (NPTA) has been faced with a flood of tenders from applicants seeking to secure state contracts in response to a range of ‘invitations to tender’ published by the various government agencies.
A Ministry of Finance source has told this newspaper that the surfeit of tenders which could have numbered around 500 over the past two weeks cover a wide range of areas including bids to provide key civil works infrastructure across the country as well as repairs and construction work in the public works and education sectors, among others. The spread of tenders also reportedly cover service provision requirements in areas such as supply of materials and Information and Technology services.
The administration of the state tender system has for years been the subject of public controversy with issues like sole-sourcing and the political manipulation of the tender process becoming matters of vigorous public debate.
Arguably, the most controversial issue in the national tender process has been the heavy favouring of the Guyana Pharmaceu-tical Corporation (GPC) for contracts to import drugs worth billions of dollars for the national health system.
That issue has been the subject of vigorous public controversy in the wake of the accession to office of the APNU+AFC administration and is believed to be linked to the recent dismissal of a former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health.
The NPTA source told this newspaper that there was “an awareness” that the process would now come under closer public scrutiny since the new tender regime would now have to accommodate much larger numbers of bidders, “some of whom might have felt that they had less opportunity to secure state contracts under the previous administration.
The source said that the focus of the NPTA on the process would include paying particularly close attention to bidders’ adherence to tender re-=quirements including, particularly, possession of Guyana Revenue Autho-rity (GRA) and National Insurance Scheme (NIS) compliances, requirements that used to be the subject of controversy in the past.
The recent flood of bids has led to the Tuesday tender-opening process extending well into the night, a circumstance which, this newspaper understands, now places significant additional pressure on the limited staff available to the NPTA.
