THE Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) has ruled that the use of the ‘force account’ method in the implementation of development projects has been generally fruitful.
However, the authority encouraged effective management of the expense account method for it to bear good results.
The revelation comes after the authority did a study to look into the effectiveness of this procurement system after receiving various arguments from some stakeholders over the system.
The study involved 175 projects in the health, water and education sectors that were carried out through the force account.
The projects are among those funded through the Covid-19 relief package.
PPRA’s research and documentation manager Engineer Nashon Masunya stated that recently there was an increase in the application of the force account method in the implementation of public projects, particularly in the construction of schools, health centres, government offices and residential buildings.
Eng Masunya noted that the increase raised several issues related to violation of ethics guiding public procurement and contracts management, hence leading to high spending on the projects.
He said the study also focused on looking at whether the force account enhanced ‘value for money’ in the implementation of the project so as to enable the authority to give advice to the government and development stakeholders.
It was established that there were places where the method worked out though in some areas it was not successful.
He said since the PPRA has a mandate of managing public procurement, it has a duty of ensuring that the value for money is seen in projects’ implementation.
There are some scenarios that force an institution to use the ‘force account’ method, such as the size of the project and distance.
“If the project is small and located in an area that is hard to reach, then it forces an institution to use the force account system”, he argued.
He reminded the government’s institutions to make sure that they have experts capable of supervising the system to make it yield better results.
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