The ear tags tender and �the for sale BMC' -but you can't do that yet?

Correspondent | Tuesday January 21, 2014 16:49

 

That the Ministry of Agriculture begins the New Year with a torrent is hardly surprising.  In the few years past, the ministry, together with its parastatal BMC, dominated the news for all the wrong reasons.

And, it is not likely to be any different in 2014, the impending national notwithstanding.

But what I find interesting is the storyline that the DCEC has cancelled a tender process. It was not made clear in the newspaper article the stage at which this tender was cancelled - whether at evaluation, adjudication or award stage. Still the intriguing aspect remains: does the DCEC have the power to cancel a tender? As a creature of statute the DCEC can only exercise powers conferred upon it by statute.

My reading of the Corruption and Economic Crime Act is that it does not expressly give the DCEC the power to do that. That power, in my reading of the relevant statutes, is reposed in the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Board (PPADB) by the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act (PPADA). 

 Legal niceties aside, the question remains why a company that was involved in the development of the tender documents was allowed to tender for the same project in which it had drafted the terms of reference? If this allegation is true, then there is something terribly wrong with this ministry. Which is why I cannot wait to see what the Reatile Parliamentary Committee has got to say about the role of the line ministry in the decline of the beef industry in Botswana.

The BMC story also has an intriguing twist to it. Similarly, it deals with procurement. It is common knowledge that BMC is one of the parastatals earmarked for privatisation.

Like the BTC and NDB privatisation transactions, a divestiture transaction must be preceded and informed by a due diligence investigation (or a business case study).

Does the minister have authority to even entertain an unsolicited bid to buy a public enterprise that has been earmarked for privatisation? I think not.

Such process would be illegal and therefore liable to be set aside on that account. I thefore doubt that any serious investor would want to put his money in a transaction that is wrought with such irregularities and illegalities. 

The ministry had last year at the Otse Letsema promised the cattle producers that the Government will undertake a thorough beef and cattle industry sector review before carrying out any policy reform regarding the BMC, and its near monopoly on the export of beef and cattle. That programme has not even started.

I also hope the minister will not even attempt to re-table the BMC Amendment bill before he satisfies the conditions precedent that he set for himself in order for him to do so. 

 

Lebone Molatlhiwa

Mopipi