‘PRAZ needs to upgrade systems’

Herald Reporter

The computer scandal in which two companies wanted to sell laptops and desktop computers to Parliament of Zimbabwe at several times the going market price, could have been avoided if the board of the Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (PRAZ) had heeded President Mnangagwa’s calls to reform operations, experts have said.

The two companies are Blinart Investments P/L and Mid-End Computers and Hardware.

Blinart Investments wanted to supply 173 laptops at a price of US$9 264,48 each, while Mid-End Computers wanted to supply desktop computers at US$3 076,61 each.

But alert officials at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, which acts as the backstop on procurement to ensure there is value for money since Parliament changed the law, picked the grossly inflated prices and raised the red flag, resulting in the cancellation of the tenders, and blacklisting of the two companies.

Permanent Secretary for Finance and Economic Development Mr George Guvamatanga wrote to Clerk of Parliament Mr Kennedy Chokuda on September 14, saying the prices for the laptops and desktop computers had “been exorbitantly inflated way beyond those that are prevailing in the market and hence, are not acceptable”.

Corporate governance experts said PRAZ, an organisation established by the Government to regulate procurement, should “have noted the inflated prices and vetoed them well before submission to the Ministry of Finance”.

The Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act mandates PRAZ to provide guidance to procuring entities to achieve the objectives of the Act that include ensuring value for money. This is besides the essential duty of PRAZ of clearing potential suppliers in advance ensuring they pay taxes, are properly set up and obey all laws.

An expert on corporate governance Mr Tonderai Nyandebvu said the latest tender challenge showed that after President Mnangagwa criticised PRAZ along with Cottco and National Social Security Authority (NSSA) recently, the PRAZ board did not work on improving the way the organisation operates.

On May 29 this year, President Mnangagwa criticised the way PRAZ functions in his weekly column in our sister paper, The Sunday Mail, over its handling of the concerns of coal mining companies, who needed to be able to enter into longer-term contracts with Zesa to raise investment finance.

Mr Nyandebvu said after the Ministry of Finance identified that public procurement was driving speculative foreign currency dealings and stopped payments, resulting in the near convergence of formal and informal forex rates, PRAZ was supposed to ensure all other invoices that followed were “reasonable”.

“PRAZ has demonstrated total incompetence to manage the process of achieving value for money as prescribed by the law,” he said.

“One month after the freeze of payments because of procurement-related weaknesses, PRAZ is not rethinking its modus operandi to move in line with Government expectations.

“The problem is that the public procurement system has not been transformed from the level of achieving transparency to the level that the other objectives specified in the Procurement Act can be achieved.”

Mr Nyandebvu added that it did not bode well for the PRAZ chief executive to approve an exorbitant tender price, especially after the Special Procurement Oversight Committee review.

A procurement expert who spoke on condition of anonymity said in view of the objectives of the National Development Strategy 1 of eradicating corruption, the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) should investigate PRAZ to establish if it was not colluding with some suppliers.

Efforts to get a comment from PRAZ chief executive officer Mr Clever Ruswa were fruitless as his mobile phone was unreachable.