IEBC official put on the spot over inflation of tender

An IEBC clerk keys in a voter’s ID details during the Biometric Voter Registration exercise in Nairobi in 2012. PHOTO | FILE  

By EDWIN MUTAI, emutai@ke.nationmedia.com

In Summary

• Praxidise Tororei questioned over award of Biometric Voter Registration tender to Face Technologies.

The chairperson of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) tender committee was Tuesday hard pressed to explain why a company that submitted a bid that was above the budgeted amount for procurement of the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits was favoured.

Praxidise Tororei, the IEBC director for Legal and Public Affairs, had a hard time explaining why the procurement team rejected the Tender Evaluation Committee’s recommendation to award the
multibillion-shilling contract to India’s 4G Identity solutions and instead went ahead to sign up Face Technologies Limited, the third-lowest evaluated bidder.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which is scrutinising the auditor-general’s report on the procurement of BVR kits and other electoral materials for the 2013 General Election, had sought to know why the tender committee disregarded clear recommendations by the evaluation team.

Suba MP John Mbadi questioned the decision by members of the tender committee to resign in July 2012, suggesting they did so after realising that they could not succeed in pushing to award the tender to a particular bidder.

Ms Tororei, however, told the committee that the committee called for a re-evaluation of bids after it noted that there was “no synergy between financial and technical evaluations of the four firms that qualified for the tender.”

“The tender committee noted that there was no formula to arrive at what was recommended as the lowest evaluated bidder by the evaluation team,” she said.

Ms Tororei told the committee, chaired by MP Sakwa Bunya, that the evaluation committee’s report was not conclusive as it lacked due diligence.

READ: Parliament demands forensic audit of BVR kits purchase

She said the commission had received a preliminary report from the ministry of Foreign Affairs through the Kenyan High Commissioner in New Delhi stating that 4G Identity solutions should not be allowed to enter into any business transaction with any government institution in Kenya.

She said the committee made a further recommendation that a new independent evaluation team be appointed to carry out financial re-evaluation of the bidders.

Ms Tororei said former IEBC chief executive officer James Oswago reconstituted the committee to conduct a reevaluation of the financial bids for supply of BVRs.

“On July 2, 2012, the tender committee looked at the report of the special team on financial evaluation and we noted that Symphony had been ranked first, Ontrack second, Face Technologies third and 4G fourth,” said Ms Tororei.

The tender committee realised that Symphony had erroneously been ranked as the most preferred yet it was not fully locally-owned and could not source local materials for the supply of the BVRs as stipulated in the Procurement Act.

“From the re-evaluation, Face Technologies was the preferred bidder and we recommended that it be awarded the tender” she said