At a recent meeting with stakeholders, the procurement body introduced its new disciplinary code. The public, the contractors and the procuring industry needed the protection that will hopefully be offered by the suggested code. There have been complaints that many companies are unable to deliver on the contracts they have been awarded and yet it appears PPADB is powerless to act and protect the taxpayer. To make it worse, the non-delivering companies are rewarded with new contracts even before they complete the old ones. The public feels that regular defaulters need to be subjected to some form of discipline to curb their truancy and failure to deliver. Often the defaulting companies get millions as the public loses out on two fronts because some of the social infrastructure takes time to be completed after the departure of the defaulting contractors. We know of clinics and roads that were left incomplete while the contractor would have run away with millions of public funds while communities are left to suffer.
The worst case, in this instance, is the building of the Serowe Stadium, which barely after completion proved to be a safety hazard. After wasting millions of the public funds, nobody knows what has happened to the company that constructed the stadium. We are hopeful that the new disciplinary regime will help to weed out unethical conduct that is rampant in the procurement process. There have been reports of fronting, use of insider trading and bribery between contractors and those who award government tenders. This is one reason why projects are given to companies that do not have the skills, resources and the wherewithal to do the work. They get the projects purely on the strength of the bribe they give or the influence they wield.
