New phase of procurement starts Jan 2016
THE Class Head of Procurement and Supply Chain Management of the Civil Service, Dr Tett Affotey-Walters, has promised a new phase of procurement in the country, starting January 2016.
According to him, public procurement experts have been employed by the government to help reduce the burden on over expenditure, the incidence of judgement debts, delays in payments and over-invoicing by ensuring that they are minimised or completely eliminated.
That, he said, would help the government save more money to invest in development projects.
He added that procurement was going to be stronger in the development of Ghana’s infrastructure sector to ensure that projects were completed on time and with the right price.
Mr Affotey-Walters made this known at the opening of the third Procurement and Supply Chain Management Summit 2015 in Accra.
The theme for the two-day summit was: ”Advancing the frontiers of procurement and supply chain management system in Ghana.”
Accountability
To ensure accountability, he said, contractors who did not complete their projects on time would be brought to book and contractual disciplines would be enforced.
He added that issues of evaluation, which are always clapped on government, would be reduced.
Mr Affotey-Walters further stated that to ensure transparency and also prevent the incidence of potential suppliers not getting tender documents to buy, all tender documents would be uploaded onto websites with effect from next year.
In her key note address, the Chief Director of the Office of the Head of Civil Service, Mrs Cynthia Asare Bediako, said critical attention must be given to procurement related issues in every sector of the economy if the country was to develop.
She noted that procurement was the engine of the nation’s development, but little attention was being given to it.
Gaps in developmental agenda
“What attention are we giving to this group of people, who for me, hold the life-line to our development? How seriously are we taking procurement courses? Are we training them enough? Are we recruiting the right calibre of people? Are we employing this group of people that we think should set the ball rolling? We must accept the fact that our lives are centred around procurement and we need to recognise and nurture it,” she added.
Mrs Asare Bediako, therefore, called for re-strategising if the country was to move on.
She was also of the view that procurement officers should be held accountable for the gaps in the development of the country, since it was their duty to ensure that every budget of the government went through effective procurement process.
“For that matter, if we are complaining of one service or something, as Ghanaians, we need to ask ourselves what went wrong or what is going wrong in the process. That is why I am saying that we may be able to hold the procurement professionals accountable for some of these things, because at the end of the day, the big budgets that we read about for the construction of roads, dams, hospitals must all be questioned,” she stated.
