No excuses, just follow laid down procedures: Praz

THE Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Praz) has challenged accounting officers and local authorities to follow laid-down procurement procedures to ensure successful project implementation instead of giving excuses for failure.

While some local authorities are quick to blame procurement bottlenecks for delayed execution of several capital projects after being allocated funds, the authority has said most problems emanate from procurement managers who give wrong information to accounting officers regarding the procurement process.
Others also simply fail to adhere to set procurement rules and as a result of the delays development suffers.

In an interview on the sidelines of a recent stakeholder engagement meeting in Kadoma, PRAZ chief executive officer, Mr Clever Ruswa, said it was high time accounting officers followed the laid down procurement procedures. In order to enhance smooth procurement processes, he said the authority has intensified its engagements with the bidding community to demystify some myths.

Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (PRAZ)

“We’re now through the transitional period whereby we were aligning the new Act to the activities on the ground. We are now saying accounting officers are expected to know what is expected to be done and they should do what they are supposed to do instead of hiding behind Praz,” said Mr Ruswa.

“It’s imperative to continuously engage the accounting officers to hear and to appreciate the procedural ways of doing things. We need to capacitate them so that they do things properly.”
He said going forward the authority will not hesitate to sanction those who deviate from the Act, adding other Government arms like the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission and the police will also be engaged in case one deviations from the Act.
Mr Ruswa singled out our recurrent problems like forward pricing by some bidders saying this needs to be addressed as it was frustrating national development progress.

“Where necessary, we will evoke the necessary sanctions like debarring some members of the bidding community. We should get such information from accounting officers and once we do that, we bring sanity into the procurement process,” he said.
He also warned some local authorities who were not using public finances saying these funds were not supposed to be kept in banks but used for the purposes they were disbursed for.

“As you know, roads were declared an emergency by President Emmerson Mnangagwa and as such local authorities received funds through the Emergency Road Rehabilitation Programme (ERRP),” said Mr Ruswa.
“But there were a lot of pushbacks within local authorities as some had used only about 20 percent of the funds.
“All the 92 local authorities were given a special and shorter route on March 11 2021 and another one on April 9, 2021, of using the ERRP funds. Surprisingly, some local authorities are not using the funds they were given,” he said.

Praz was created through an Act of Parliament with a clear mandate of supervising public procurement processes to ensure transparency, fairness, honesty, cost-effectiveness, and fair competition as required by the Constitution.
Government is reforming public procurement in order to realise economic and social benefits that are in line with Vision 2030, as well as National Development Strategy (NDS1).

National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1)

Accounting officers, who now have the mandate to award tenders in various ministries, departments and agencies, converged in Kadoma for a capacity-building workshop, which was meant to ensure the successful implementation of the new procurement laws.
Permanent secretaries from all ministries converged for the meeting where Praz listened to concerns and had deliberations for the way forward to ensure a smooth procurement process. Earlier, Praz met with town clerks and council chief executive officers of all 92 local authorities.-chronicles