By Our Reporter.
The fate of a controversial Sh. 118 M Kenya police housing project in Ndhiwa , the backyard of internal security assistant minister Orwa Ojode will be known on Thursday when the public procurement oversight authority meet to look at the issue.
The project which seeks to ease the biting housing problem for the police officers working at Ndhiwa police station in Homa Bay county had a false start last month following a controversy over the award of the tender which saw one of the 12 contractors who participated in the bids petitioning the public procurement administrative review board to review the award citing alleged anomalies of procedure in procurement .
According to documents in our possession ,the tender for the proposed 16 units type E flats was advertised in the newspapers and opened on February 8th this year at the boardroom of the DC, Kisumu East district by the district tender committee chaired by the area DDO.
Twelve tenderers returned their tender documents amongst them, a firm known as Cell Arc Systems. It is this firm which petitioned the board for review of the tender award accusing the procuring entity of irregularly awarding the tender to a firm whose bid they claim was higher than theirs.According to documents we obtained while investigating the matter, Cell Arc Systems was the lowest responsive tenderer out of the four companies which were found to be responsive after evaluation.
The project had been estimated to cost Sh.118.7M by the quantity surveyor from the ministry of public works in Kisumu who prepared the bill of quantity for the project and according to the documents relating to the tender , Cell Arc Systems had a tender sum of Sh107,082,999.80.
Interestingly, the company whose details and name we also obtained and which won the disputed tender had quoted sh.128,336,019.20 which was the highest.
Other two companies which also prequalified after evaluation whose names we can not reveal for legal reasons quited sh.110,045,512.06 and sh 118,120,215.05.
In their petition, Cell Arc advance that the tender committee was required according to section 66(4) of the procurement Act to award them the contract being the lowest” responsive tenderer at Sh 107,082,999.80.
Instead, the committee awarded the tender to the winning company at Sh 128,336,019.40, a bid which was higher that that of the petitioner by a difference of sh 21.2 M.
Part of their letter to the review board dated 10th of March this year read in part ” the decision by the procuring entity to declare our bid unsuccessful was arrived at without due regard to the evaluation procedure and criteria as set out in the tender documents and the Act”.
It went ” under section 50(3), tenders shall be ranked according to their evaluated price and successful tender shall be the tender with the lowest evaluated price in accordance with section 66(4)of the Act”
The petitioner also states to the board that according to the technical evaluation committee report , the contractor who was given the job has only completed a project of Sh. 9M while Cell Arc has successfully completed a project Of Sh 59.4M and also implementing another worth sh 75.5M project within Kisumu.
” It is therefore inconceivable and in total breach of the Act and rules of natural practice to award contract to a firm whose bid was higher and also less experienced and technically qualified. Financial analysis also indicate that most of the rates of the contractor were high” read the letter to the board.
In fact following the appeal, the Kisumu East DC Mabeya Mogaka, in his letter to the Nyanza PPO Njue Njagi dated 14th March, which was also copied to the Nyanza PC and the regional commissioner Central Nyanza, informed the provincial police boss that the contract agreement for the proposed residential units for Ndhiwa police station should not be signed until he is notified that the complaint raised has been adequately addressed by the public procurement oversight authority who have been petitioned.
Notable is the DC’s comment in the same letter and we quote ” Indeed the highest tenderer was awarded the contract while it is prescribed that it is the lowest tenderer who should be awarded”.
Mabeya in fact cautioned in his letter to the PPO that ” from my quick observation I note that the government will lose Sh 18 M if this particular contract is signed”.
Most of the contractors we talked to during our investigations claimed officers from the public works inflated the cost of the project with some insisting the project could not be over Sh 70 M. Our efforts to very the claims by the quantity surveyors from the ministry were futile.
In his reply to the grounds of the appeal, the procuring entity on their part insisted it did an evaluation as per the relevant provisions in the Act and regulations by converting preliminary , technical and financial evaluation.
According to his response in a letter dated 16th March , the district procurement officer Mr. Luke Midamba said the award was not based on the lowest tenderer alleged by the applicant rather it was based on lowest evaluated tender after considering the criteria set in tender advertisement.
whether the project will be allowed to proceed to full implementation with issue raised by both the parties now remains to be seen as the board sit to review the award today at a Kisumu hotel.Based on their findings, the tender will either be nullified or be given green light.
ENDS.