In the midst of the budget rush on Wednesday, the Central Procurement Board of Namibia announced their decision to cancel the multimillion-dollar medical tender that caused major public uproar last month. Part of the tender was awarded to Amnics Trading, a company owned by businessman Shapwa Kanyama, which only employed three people on a permanent basis. 

The N$650 million tender included the supply of surgical gloves for N$400 million, condoms for N$111 million, and other medical supplies.

This contract was part of the N$2,8 billion batch of health tenders awarded by the CPBN.

Namibians were not happy.

Despite an error by the daily who broke the news of the tender, miscalculating a condom to cost over N$140, the allocation of the deal and the CPBN’s failure to verify if the tender recipient has the capacity to deliver was what the public was concerned about.

The outcry included calls for President Hage Geingob to intervene, who said since the change in public procurement legislation, his hands were tight. He, however, called on the CPBN to do the right thing.  We can’t say if the timing of the announcement (during the budget speech) was deliberate: to bury its newsworthiness under the avalanche of breaking budget news bites, or if it was another public relations fumble by the CPBN.  Nevertheless, the announcement came weeks after the tender was allocated and the objection period had lapsed. On Wednesday, the health ministry’s executive director Ben Nangombe bemoaned the cancellation, saying his colleagues need the equipment, and that some of the medicine and consumables will now have to be bought using the emergency procurement method, which has its own pitfalls.

We have to look no further than a report into government’s spending during the Covid-19 pandemic by auditor general Junias Kandjeke which lifted a veil on potential maleficence in the State’s procurement. It pointed to government contracts that were awarded at whim, without following the Procurement Act under the pretext of ‘state of emergency’. What was apparent is that the Office of the Prime Minister and the health ministry opted to follow a direct procurement method to source goods/services from suppliers to the value of N$1.4 million and N$4.6 million, respectively.

Such blatant defiance of the law creates fertile ground for fraud and a contravention of the Procurement Act.  So, Nangombe would do well this time to tighten the controls and ethics in his administration as the health ministry has been a hotbed of questionable tenders over the years. Many tenderpreneurs, whose companies only exist on paper, have made a killing by just shuffling papers around. Worse, politically connected order-with-me operators masked as legit businesspeople have syphoned millions from the taxpayer and added no value. It is time government ministries start doing their own procurement, straight from the manufacturers. Let the real entrepreneurs do the research, the legwork, invest money and establish legitimate local manufacturing outlets before scarce taxpayer money is entrusted to them. 

To no one’s surprise, the new tender was already up and running shortly after the cancellation announcement.  The public will certainly keep a keen eye on this one and with the new access to information law ready to be tested, there’s no place to hide for unscrupulous administrators.

This win for the taxpayer would not have arrived if the media didn’t expose the irregularities and the public did not loudly raise its disapproval for the allocation.