PPDA amending procurement law

The Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Asset Authority (PPDA) are in the process of amending the procurement laws in order to create efficiency in the procurement process.

Moses Ojambo, the PPDA Director in charge of Capacity Building and Advisory Services said the amended law would focus much on issues intended to minimize forgeries, fight corruption and reduce time wastage in the procurement and tendering process.

He noted that PPDA body has been facing challenges including long bidding periods, corruption in the bidding process, forgeries by service providers, time wastage during evaluations leading to poor service delivery.

He added that to fight forging of bid securities by companies, the amended law will replace bid securities with what he called Bid Securing Declaration.  

"Companies that were formed like today or yesterday forge documents to portray them as having been formed long time ago," he said

He was addressing journalists at the sidelines of a one day consultative meeting organized for procurement officers from northern and eastern regional local governments in Lira, northern Uganda.    

"Because we have challenges in the bidding period which is so long leading to inefficiency, we are going to create changes that will limit time to advertise for bid opportunities from 20 to 15 working days, then from 30 to 20 working days.

"The new law will also reduce the evaluation period such that evaluation of supplies should not take more than 20 working days, evaluation of consultancy services should not take more than 30 working days, while the evaluation of works should not go beyond 40 working days. Apparently there is no limit," Ojambo said. 

The amendments will not only tackle issues of bidding process but will also create new structure for procurement committees that shall include an independent chairperson, a secretary and three other members excluding procurement officers.

Procurement officers will now remain exo-officio members of procurement committees. Attempts by some procurement officers to convince the team from PPDA to have their slot retained as members of the contract committees in the amended law were rejected and instead they were advised to remain exo-officio members.

Meanwhile, MPs and other top politicians were accused by procurement officers that they put a lot of pressure on them to influence procurement process and award of tenders.