Emergency Procurement
When the Public Procurement Act (PPA) replaced the old Tender Board system in 2015, it was expected to bring forth a transparent new institutional framework to encourage greater government accountability for public spending. However, the limitations of the PPA are currently being exposed with the upsurge in direct and emergency procurement practised by the Namibian government to mitigate the worst excesses of the ongoing pandemic.
Under the PPA (No. 15 of 2015), “a public entity may procure goods using direct procurement methods in cases of emergency … allowing for procurement from a single source without competition.”
In Namibia, the COVID-19 State of Emergency lasted six months and empowered the government to procure goods and services on an uncompetitive basis. This ability to bypass the majority of red tape typically informing the procurement process facilitated over 400 procurements (180 direct and 80 emergency) being logged by the Ministry of Health and Social Services between April and June.
Emergency Procurement
When the Public Procurement Act (PPA) replaced the old Tender Board system in 2015, it was expected to bring forth a transparent new institutional framework to encourage greater government accountability for public spending. However, the limitations of the PPA are currently being exposed with the upsurge in direct and emergency procurement practised by the Namibian government to mitigate the worst excesses of the ongoing pandemic.
Under the PPA (No. 15 of 2015), “a public entity may procure goods using direct procurement methods in cases of emergency … allowing for procurement from a single source without competition.”
In Namibia, the COVID-19 State of Emergency lasted six months and empowered the government to procure goods and services on an uncompetitive basis. This ability to bypass the majority of red tape typically informing the procurement process facilitated over 400 procurements (180 direct and 80 emergency) being logged by the Ministry of Health and Social Services between April and June.
Red Flags Fluttering?
According to the IPPR, these provisions have enabled several troubling patterns to emerge which may be indicative of growing threats of corruption on the public procurement landscape, namely:
While on the one hand quick turnaround times were justified by the unprecedented context of the pandemic, increasing incidences of mere 24 hour-windows between bid issuing and closure coupled with the common occurrence of just one company being invited to bid cast a degree of doubt over the integrity of the government’s selection process.
Moreover, the Business and Intellectual Property Authority (BIPA) was also found to be poorly equipped with adequate company registration data, making it next to impossible for due diligence to be consistently practiced when offering government tenders. In fact, of the 40 randomly selected companies for which the IPPR sought out information during its research, BIPA had no information at all for 13 companies while the data of six other companies had been misplaced.
This lack of access to public information has arguably enabled the rise of a so-called ‘tenderpreneur’ class who, in their role as middlemen using political connections to acquire state contracts only to subcontract the work out to actually operable companies, serve as a drain on public funds by overcharging the state for poor service delivery and stunting economic development.
The Way Forward
To be sure, the examples discussed in the report were not presented by IPPR as necessarily constitutive of corrupt actions. Rather, the findings illustrate internationally recognised signals of potential corruption threats and/or behaviours that increase the likelihood of corruption occurring. To avoid these outcomes, IPPR made several recommendations including:
The Heritage of Fishrot
To conclude the presentation, IPPR Executive Director Graham Hopwood contextualised the report’s findings with respect to the prevailing political backdrop surrounding 2019’s Fishrot corruption scandal. As a measure of how far the government has acted to create a hostile environment for corruption in Namibian politics, the ‘red flags’ associated with public procurement during the pandemic do not suggest that much progress has been made. Indeed, asked whether the level of corruption scaled by the Fishrot accused could happen again, Hopwood admitted that without substantive reforms to public institutional oversight, the answer would sadly be yes.
In the final word, however, Hopwood insisted that there is still time for current President Hage Geingob to overcome the damaging legacies of Fishrot and become a champion of anti-corruption in the remaining four years of his second term in office.
Written by: Kitty Mcgirr (Intern)