Participants at the recently concluded European Union (EU)and Cariforum capacity building public procurement training seminar say that government ministries need to be more involved in such forums to enable bidders to better understand the procurement process within those entities.
“I think yesterday was fantastic for me. It was of an international standard and the Jamaican guy really broke it down, the way he put everything over but we need more of these forums,” Suresh Jagmohan, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of S. Jagmohan Construction and Hardware Supplies told Stabroek News yesterday.
Further, he added “But I have to say that more of the ministries need to be represented at these seminars and even host some of this training because look, yesterday many of the (agencies), GWI for example was not there and many other entities who procure, when you had questions involving them.”
On Tuesday, the EU funded a one-day training programme geared at raising knowledge and awareness in public procurement and customs and trade facilitation, in the context of the implementation of the Cariforum-EU Economic partnership agreement.
Presentations were made on the importance of public procurement to nation building, in terms of its economic, social and development significance.
Participants were also taught key concepts and guiding principles of the public procurement process with facilitators stressing its main pillars, value transparency, competition and due process.
It was against this background that Junior Minister of Finance Jaipaul Sharma stressed the need for local companies to always be competitive to keep up with international bidders, given the magnitude of monies, some 27% of the Gross Domestic Product, spent annually on the procurement of goods and services.
He underscored the importance of having international competition for not only the local bidders but government also as it decreases corruption and increases transparency of public funds.
“Opening our public procurement markets to international competition can be beneficial for several reasons. It is very important and we want to do it because it would enhance government’s ability to obtain better value for money and increase efficient use of public resources. It will also be a powerful tool to fighting corrupt practices and increase transparency and legal certainty,” Sharma said in his address.
Sharma also told participants of the many ways in which his government was moving to ensure the transparency of the procurement process and pointed to future plans to increase the limits ministries can spend on contracts without Cabinet’s no-objection, ensuring the establishment of the Public Procurement Commission (PPC), ultimately phasing out Cabinet’s role in contracts and the recently formed Bid Protest Committee (BPC) among others.
He explained that the BPC was an important part of the procurement system given that the PPC has not yet been established. “It was in the laws and the government implemented it. This is part of the whole process of the Public Procurement Commission and when that is established that Bid Protest Committee will be active and the Procurement Commission will be actively involved in such things,” he asserted.
“We have to allow it to roll out and we must say that government took the initiative to start it (the BPC) …the law stipulates that Cabinet’s role should be phased out and by government increasing the limits is an indication that we will phase it out if the Parliament don’t agree on this commission (PPC). So we will gradually phase it out if the previous administration had done that maybe contracts going to Cabinet would be 40-50 million (dollars). In the interim if the PPC was not established Cabinet should be increasing its limit every year.”
As it pertains to Cabinet’s role, the Procurement Act states that it “shall have the right to review all procurements the value of which exceeds fifteen million Guyana dollars. The Cabinet shall conduct its review on the basis of a streamlined tender evaluation report to be adopted by the authority mentioned in section 17 (2). The Cabinet and, upon its establishment, the Public Procurement Com-mission, shall review annually the Cabinet’s threshold for review of procurements, with the objective of increasing that threshold over time so as to promote the goal of progressively phasing out Cabinet involvement and decentralising the procurement process.”
But for Michelle Howard of Andre Howard Construction, the issue was not Cabinet’s role but of getting bidders to believe that their contracts were not awarded for reasons other than it was higher than the lowest bid.
“We learned certain things and it was a great training session and they tried to clear up certain specific thing but they keep saying that it is not the lowest bid that wins the contracts but you still keep seeing that in all the cases of the people who winning it is the lowest bid. So they need to clear up that,” she said.
“I think they should have more of these but you have to get someone there to clear up those things that we find hard like that lowest bid, when we know it is the lowest bid that gets the contracts,” she added.
