Public entities miss procurement plan deadline
A month into the financial year, the country still does not know the procurement plans for public entities for the 2025/26 financial year.
This is despite the Public Procurement Act requiring public entities to submit their procurement plans to the Procurement Policy Unit (PPU) at least three months before the commencement of each financial year.
According to the e-Procurement Client System, out of the 173 public entities with procurement functions, only 42 had annual procurement plans by the end of April.
Out of the 42, only five were submitted to the PPU on time, before the end of December 2024.
“When procurement plans are delayed or not publicly accessible, it can hinder oversight and lead to inefficiencies in resource allocation,” said Frederico Links, a research associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), during a procurement tracker engagement yesterday.
Links said if the procurement is problematic the service delivery is going to be problematic.
Former minister of finance and public enterprises Iipumbu Shiimi tabled a bill proposing a dedicated court to handle procurement-related disputes in March.
The public procurement amendment bill of 2025 will address critical gaps identified in the implementation of the Public Procurement Act.
The act came into operation on 1 April 2017, with the objective of promoting the fundamental principles of procurement: fairness, transparency, accountability efficiency, competitiveness, effectiveness and integrity.
The amendments proposed in this bill are meant to strengthen accountability and expedite the resolution of disputes within the public procurement system in Namibia.
Furthermore, the Swapo Party Implementation Plan of 2025 to 2030 identified the establishment of a public procurement court to handle public procurement-related cases as one of the priority areas,
According to Links, it is unclear whether a procurement court will improve processes.
“Dispute resolution in the system has contributed to delays, bottlenecks and undermined service delivery.
However, given clear capacity and resource constraints, it is unclear whether a procurement court will make things better or just deepen the dysfunction,” said Links.
Namibia is not the only country in southern Africa looking to introduce such a mechanism into its procurement system; South Africa is also looking to introduce a Public Procurement Tribunal.
However, experiences with such courts or similar tribunals have been mixed, according to Links.
“While in some instances such courts or tribunals have reduced delays caused by procurement-related litigation, in others they have contributed to such delays by becoming an additional choke point or bottleneck,” said Links.
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