Dwelling on the compliance review for the period of 2020-2021, Counsel Patrick Gomez raised concerns to the witness Ebrima Sanyang, the director of Procurement Policy and Operations at the Gambia Public Procurement Authority (GPPA), that the table indicating 505 transactions representing the amount of transactions by the procuring council was not filled up on the provided report.
He said that when he added the numbers for the total number and value of procurement method for the year 2020 and the subsequent table for the year 2021, he couldn’t have 505 transactions.
“I was thinking the numbers will tally with those that have been filled. That’s why I asked why this table was not filled because open international tender, open national tender, request for proposal, restricted tendering, single sourcing and RFQ are all zero,” witness quizzed.
It was also put to the witness that the table for 2020 gave 446 transactions for single sourcing at D25,959,001.62 while the request for quotation was 22 transactions at D4,961,155. Put together, Gomez saidthat the total number of transactions was 468 as against the 505 transactions indicated for 2020.
He said the table for 2021 also had 436 transactions for single sourcing at the value of D1,469,800.43, while there were only four transactions for requests for quotations at D162,020. Thus the number of transactions, Counsel stated, was 440, which did not reach 505 transactions as claimed for 2020.
The witness stated: “We accept that we have so many irregularities and when I looked at this, I detected and believe that the other table for 2019 was about copy and paste. The information from 2019 can be copied and pasted but we must also adjust. I want to believe that it was copied and pasted and the adjustments were not corrected because 505 is the same number of transactions we have in the 2019 table.”
Director Sanyang accepted as an authority that there were lots of irregularities and they would ensure that the issues were taken care of, addressed and communicated.
He further told the commission that interference in procurement affairs was very high and the chairman of KAC was the chairman of the contract that “heavily affects the procurement operations conducted daily”, saying he did not know public procurement.
He also confirmed that the chairman of KAC being the chairman of the contract committee, was not “proper”, adding that the CEO was mandated by the law to head the contract committee.
