VP office’s K8m contract raises questions

The Office of the Vice-President’s K8 million procurement contract yesterday stirred confusion following conflicting details on the mode of the award of the contract and observations that the internal procurement committee (IPC) was bypassed.

The developments came to light when officials from the Office of the Vice-President appeared before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to respond to audit queries for the financial year ending June 30 2016.

Principal Secretary for Department of Disaster Management Affairs (Dodma) Clement Chinthu-Phiri, who is also the controlling officer in the Office of the Vice-President, initially told the committee the K8 million procurement was made using single sourcing before later stating that two other quotations were sourced but were missing during the period of the audit.

He said: “I would like to inform the committee that the procurements in question were in fact not made using single sourcing. However, during the audit, only single quotations attached to the payment vouchers were found.”

Chinthu-Phiri said the other two quotations were misplaced, but were later traced for presentation to the Auditor General.

However, the appendix to support his explanation was not available, prompting the Auditor General to intervene.

Auditor General Stephenson Kamphasa noted that the information the Office of the Vice-President gave the committee was not adding up and could potentially put his office in a mess.

“I am trying to check the appendices, they don’t make sense and yet whatever came to my office was okay. I have checked everything and I fear we will now be going into how I cleared these. It is not matching with the responses that are coming out,” he said, requesting for time to liaise with the Office of the Vice-President.

Kamphasa noted that the IPC minutes were not attached to the response and the response on that was not matching with what he had found.

After conferring with the Auditor General, PAC vice-chairperson Kamlepo Kalua agreed on the need for the controlling officer and his team to liaise with the Auditor General.

He said: “Following advice from the Auditor General, I don’t think at this juncture we can proceed with what we intended to interact with you. I, therefore, send you back to liaise with the Auditor General and come up with the appropriate way of coming up with these things. The Auditor General will advise us on the way forward.”

Apart from the K8 million query, the Office of the Vice-President was also taken to task to explain the whereabouts of supporting documents to K45.5 million worth of payment vouchers, K83.4 million worth of fuel not accounted for and K55.8 million which was misallocated.

The committee is yet to set a date when the VP’s office will appear again to respond to the queries.

Section 8 of the Public Procurement Act provides that procurement for goods and services should be authorised by the IPC while Section 35 (1) states that at least three competitive quotations from different suppliers should be obtained to determine the award of a contract.

In April last year, the Office of the Vice-President also came into the limelight over alleged misappropriation of K83 million through payments without supporting documents.

However, the office’s director of administration Eric Yesaya at the time allayed fears of fraud, attributing the situation to poor record keeping.

During the review of the 2015/16 Auditor General’s report submitted to Parliament, it revealed that government lost about K4.4 billion due to weaknesses in financial and internal controls in its ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). n