The debacle of our Public Contracts Policy

During the current session of the National Assembly, which opened early last week, some parliamentarians were amazingly vocal on the issue of government’s inability to attain the necessary percentage in the realisation of the Public Investment Budget. They vowed to take government ministers to task during this session. They must tell Cameroonians why this has become a perennial misfortune, the MPs seemed to suggest.

This year’s percentage of the Public Investment Budget falls far below 50% and this is catastrophic for our dream, the Cameroonian dream, to meet with the global challenges of economic growth and the ability of government to be seen to be working relentlessly for the good life of its people.

In line with this is the other related phenomenon of the poor execution of public contracts, which has succeeded so well in frustrating national efforts to move forward in changing the course of our infrastructural development towards greater achievements.

Unfortunately, the regulation of this sector has suffered major set backs, due largely to an undefined policy of who to regulate and supervise the process from one stage to other.

And by this we are referring to the process which begins from call to tender, to the shortlisting, final award, payments, execution of a project to the finishing point and ending up at the final assessment of the finished product, in order to ascertain that it conforms with standards.

It is known that this regulatory responsibility has within certain periods been moved from one supervisory or regulatory authority to the other. First, it was in the hands of the Senior Divisional Officers of one Division or the other.

Whatever happened, it was removed from the table of the SDO to a Tender’s Board. Even at this point, the change did not seem to justify its presence in the process.

The next move was the establishment of a special ministry in charge of public contracts, named Ministry of Public Contracts. With the setting up of this structure all hope rose that a solution will be found here. The import of this ministry is still to be felt, meaning that this too has been a colossal failure.

We do not forget the existence of another body known as the Public Tenders Regulatory Board. In all of this, the method and spirit of awarding contracts, on the part of the supervisory authority in the order in which we have mentioned them above, have been plagued with dishonesty, and such factors as kickbacks have bedevilled the system.

On the part of the recipients of the contracts, the issue of kickbacks to those who have been involved in the awards, paralyse any genuine efforts for the contractor to carry out any standard job.

The other irrational principle is that of giving so much consideration for the lowest bidder. Considering the lowest bidder is already a guarantee for a poor job, considering the fact that, from this low bid, a substantial part of it must go to the man on the driver’s seat during the whole process.

The last and perhaps the most criminal and unpatriotic stage in this chain of mismanagement of this sector is the role of the evaluators who are usually assigned to evaluate the quality of the job before handing it over. The tendency is that there are very few jobs that have ever been rejected as having fallen below standards.

The visit of the evaluators is usually preceded by an “envelop” as bribes are now called. In this case, the evaluator will only be proved wrong, when in the short term evidence of a bad job starts manifesting. The sad side of the whole drama is that, neither the contractor nor the evaluator seems to have any case to answer. This is where corruption has become a virtue, if not a way of life in our society today. Needless citing those projects that have either not been properly executed or abandoned outrightly.

In his address to the nation last December 31, the president was openly disgusted on the issue of poor execution of public investment projects. Unfortunately, one year after not much has changed.

So, if parliamentarians are serious in their avowed intention to take ministers to task over their inability to realise the public investment budgets on their tables, we feel justified to question the role of those assigned as supervising authorities in the public contracts sector. We have exposed their weakness, they should admit it.

The two are closely related and bound together in a lofty purpose of pushing this nation upwards. We possess the abundance of resources which gives no room for us lagging behind other less privileged neighbours. With corruption and inertia on our hands, we should lay our heads in shame.