Public Contract Award Now Official

Minister Abba Sadou launched the operation in Yaounde on Monday January 20, 2014 simultaneously with the regions. He announced a monthly verification of all tenders boards to ensure that contracts are awarded on time and according to laid down norms.

The award of public contracts for the effective consumption of the FCFA 1,000 billion public investment budget contained in the 2014 FCFA 3,312 State budget is now official. The Minister of Public Contracts, Abba Sadou, launched the contract awards in a conference yesterday January 20 at the Yaounde Conference Centre with a call on all stakeholders in the contracts chain to work resolutely towards a better and timely award of public contracts so that at term the hitches that marred the process in 2013 would be history this year.

The launch of the public contracts award, the 7th in its kind, Minister Abba Sadou said, sought to improve the hitherto poor mastery of the contract award procedures, late award of contracts and weak consumption of the investment credit so as to improve on the quality of projects executed and shun lateness in the execution of the projects.

2013, he noted, witnessed the award of 6,685 contracts amounting to FCFA 1,482,598,654,403. The regions received and treated some 3,107 contract award files and signed 3,201 contracts to the tune of FCFA 62.698.6 billion. Compared to the 3,486 contracts programmed in February 2013 for a sum of FCFA 86.388 billion, Minister Abba Sadou said, the award rate stood at 91.8 per cent representing 72.6 per cent of the budget previewed. Meanwhile, contracts patterning to the Central tenders board witnessed a 48.5 per cent award rate given that some 1,058 contract award files were awaited at MINMAP but only 513 effectively came in.

The 2014 contract award season placed on the theme, "Projects approved and financed must be effectively executed according to standards," the Minister noted, must be better than previous ones. Besides building the capacities of the various stakeholders for efficiency, monthly verification committees have also been announced at the various tenders' boards to ensure that contracts are awarded on time and according to laid down norms. "There is need for capacity building. We have begun the exercise to empower the project owner which will continue this year, specifically in February. We have decided to be closer to the tenders' boards at each level (ministerial, regional and divisional ones) to see their rhythm of work and this will be every month. We are all engaged to see that after programming, we should be able to take care of the different dates that we have fixed by ourselves," Minister Abba Sadou said.