Was cycle ten textbooks tender award flawed?

May 30, 2004

THE long-awaited tender for the supply of primary schools textbooks has finally be awarded leaving many giant publishers crying foul that the process was flawed.

By John Eremu

THE long-awaited tender for the supply of primary schools textbooks has finally be awarded leaving many giant publishers crying foul that the process was flawed.

Five prominent publishers protested their disqualification and petitioned the Public Procurement and Disposal of Assets Authority (PPDA) for an administrative review of the whole evaluation process.

While the firms claim that some of them were prematurely thrown out and others favoured, the Ministry of Education and Sports maintains that the process was foolproof and the unsuccessful bidders genuinely disqualified.

Twenty-eight firms purchased bid documents for the multi-million shilling tender but only 19 beat the October 28, 2003 deadline. After accusations and counter accusations, the tenders were awarded a week ago after the PPDA and the Solicitor General cleared the ministry of any wrongdoing.

The award of the sh14bn tender now paves way for the successful bidders to market their books in schools.

The lucky firms include Longhorn Limited, which clinched the tender to supply science and social studies textbooks, Mukono Bookshop for atlases and also social studies textbooks.

The others were Pearson Educational Limited and Macmillan also for atlases, social studies textbooks and dictionaries. Also qualified were Kamalu Longman for dictionaries and Joibaso for mathematics, social studies and principles of agriculture.

The leading publishing firms that challenged their disqualification included MK Publishers, MK General School Supplies, Global Education Link, Fountain Publishers and Gustro. Fountain and Gustro, however, later withdrew their petitions.

The Education Ministry Permanent Secretary, Francis Lubanga, said in a statement that MK Publishers, MK General School Supplies and Global Education Link, all controlled by one person, were disqualified for collusion.

He said investigations revealed that the three firms presented similar manuscripts and awarding the tenders to them would have defeated the ministry’s policy of giving teachers at least three titles to choose from.

Pius Bigirimana, the chairperson of the ministry’s contracts committee said they were guided by transparency and professionalism in awarding the tenders.

He said textbooks tender evaluation process goes through several stages and people, including local and international consultants, and as such cannot be manipulated.

“Fairness, transparency and professionalism are our guiding principles and that is why we allow appeals. The appeals are there to ensure that everybody is treated fairly,” Bigirimana said.

He said the process goes through preliminary, technical and pedagogical evaluation before the manuscripts are given to experts from International Book Development (IDB), a reputable book evaluation firm in the UK under a programme funded by the British Department for International Development.

Under the preliminary evaluation, Bigirimana explained that the bids are evaluated on their legal status and conformity to the administrative requests like bid security, supplying the required number of manuscripts, teachers guides, whether the manuscripts do not have any distinguishing marks, and letters explaining how the manuscripts meet the objectives of the curriculum. Here, a firm either out rightly fails or passes.

The successful firms are then subjected to technical evaluation, which looks at the bid conformity in respect of the text paper, weight specification, colour, opacity, grain direction, finishing, format and binding style.

Those that pass the technical stage are then passed to teachers for pedagogical (content) evaluation.

Experienced teachers, usually from up-country schools are picked at random, trained in evaluation and given the manuscripts.

“Security is provided and the evaluators are secluded from the public, no visitors as well as telephones are allowed for the three weeks they are doing the evaluation,” Bigirimana said.

The teachers evaluate the books in terms of conformity to the curriculum, content, language and editorial quality, ease of use and durability.

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