Central Medical Stores extends K1bn drug deadline
Central Medical Stores Trust (CMST) early this month extended the drug delivery deadline in its second tender worth $2.969 million (about K1 billion) by another month after suppliers only delivered about 45 percent by the initial end of the May deadline, officials have said.
In an interview recently, CMST director of corporate services David Nungu said the trust is still compiling figures of the drug deliveries at its warehouses, saying they would know whether all the drugs have been delivered by end of the week.
“All deliveries for drugs in the first emergency tender were completed. For the Restricted International Competitive Bidding (RICB), we only got 45 percent by end of May. We hope we should be moving towards 80 percent delivery,” said Nungu.
He said some suppliers imported most of the drugs on time, but delayed to deliver them at the trust’s warehouses because CMST was also clearing up its warehouses.
“We extended the deadline to end of this month because we were doing stocktaking in our warehouses to clean up our inventory information,” said Nungu.
He said when the May deadline elapsed, the trust summoned all suppliers to explain why they had not yet completed their deliveries.
“Some of them had their drugs at the ports while for others, the drugs were already in the country but just needed some clearance. Most of the delays have something to do with issues in our warehouses. We expect to get all the drugs by end of the week,” said Nungu.
The K1.16 billion drug tender was issued about four weeks after awarding of the controversial emergency drug tender of $1.657 million (roughly K650 million) for cholera, diabetes and malaria drugs in which suppliers had failed to deliver about 42 percent of the total drug package by April 16 deadline.
