Pretoria - The Gauteng Provincial Government has announced that the upgrade of Cedar Road in Fourways, Johannesburg with an estimated value of R50 million is the pilot project for the new open tender process.
The pilot project was officially unveiled by Gauteng MEC for Finance, Barbara Creecy, and MEC for Roads and Transport, Ismail Vadi on Monday to restore public confidence in the provincial government’s tender processes.
The two provincial departments are piloting new steps to improve transparency of the process and compliance with supply chain management provisions of the Public Finance Management Act.
Central to this is the decision to open the Bid Adjudication Committee process to public observation as well as to publish the outcomes of each stage in the tendering process on the provincial Treasury website.
MEC Creecy said: “We want to re-establish public confidence in the tender process and we believe that the best way to do this is to make the process more open to public scrutiny, so that bidders are convinced that the award process is fair and transparent.
“The public should have confidence that Treasury regulations protecting the procurement of goods and services are being adhered to by government officials.
“Essentially, what we are doing is to ensure that the ground rules are established before the start of the process and that these conditions are not changed during the process itself. The probity team appointed by Treasury will ensure that the bid evaluation committee sticks to these ground rules”.
MEC Vadi confirmed that his department will participate fully in the pilot project and that it has identified the long-awaited upgrading of Cedar Road to test the practical application of the new tender procedures.
“We are particularly pleased that our department has been selected for this pilot study as on average we process over 100 tender awards annually,” he said.
The launch of this project means that in future the public will be able to witness the decision-making process around the awarding of tenders.
After the close of the advertising process, tender boxes will be opened publicly and all documents will be imprinted to prevent unauthorised switching of documents later in the process.
Gauteng Treasury has introduced additional measures to enhance the transparency of the existing tendering process such as:
- ensuring that there is detailed work to establish the conditions of contracts and proper estimates of costs and time prior to advertising so that the evaluation criteria are appropriate and do not need to be changed during the evaluation itself;
- allowing Provincial Treasury to observe the in-house departmental tender processes to ensure greater compliance with supply chain management procedures;
- appointing an independent team to audit all tenders with a contract value of more than R50 million; and
- publishing the outcome of each stage of the tender process on the Treasury website.
Treasury will in future also take greater interest in the implementation of contracts by ensuring that there is closer monitoring and evaluation of performance by contractors.
Provincial departments will have to inform Treasury of any contractor who is not performing in line with expectations and Treasury will in turn warn other departments in the province about the poor performance of the contractor.
Once the pilot project is completed the lessons learned will be included in a Revised Open Tender Policy that will be taken to the Gauteng Executive Council for adoption across the provincial government. - SAnews.gov.za
