Some road contractors at COCOBOD’s open tendering session
THE GHANA Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) announced on Wednesday that it received almost 800 bids from contractors for the construction of cocoa roads across the country.
This was after the organisation had advertised to source contractors for cocoa roads through a public competitive tender process.
According to the board, its decision to break away from the usual sole sourcing and restrictive tendering practice in favour of an open public competitive tender process was to introduce greater transparency, take away acts of favouritism and nepotism while ensuring value for money through competitive pricing.
It said the secrecy that normally characterised the award of cocoa road projects in the past was responsible for the many poor-quality road construction projects and project price inflations.
It continued that the current administration suspended cocoa road projects for an audit to be conducted after anomalies were detected in contracts awarded by the previous administration.
“The suspension allowed for a re-scoping and proper alignment of funds to execute cocoa road projects. The government has since lifted the suspension and given the go-ahead for the fixing of deplorable roads leading to cocoa farms nationwide.
“The public competitive tender process was open to all road construction companies that meet the publicised requirements. The received tenders will be submitted to a committee that will evaluate each to determine that the tenders do indeed meet the standardised requirements,” it explained.
The tenders will then go either to the central tender committee or the entity tender committee, which will make their recommendations to the management of COCOBOD before management awards the contracts.
As part of the requirements for bidding, each construction company is expected to submit proof of having met all tax and social security obligations such as having certification from the labour authorities, having approval from the Public Procurement Authority and a valid certificate from the roads and highways authority.
Besides, the companies also have to show that they have the financial capacity, the experience and the right personnel to successfully execute the road projects for which they bid.
The committees, which are tasked with ensuring value for money, will check for realistic pricing within the tenders submitted and select the lowest responsive bidder. This way, good pricing is assured without compromising the best quality in the road constructions.
Even though this kind of evaluation process can take up to three months, it is expected that the committee will fast-track the process so that contracts can be awarded sometime in January 2020.
A total of 43 road contracts will be awarded for construction in this first batch of cocoa road projects. The road projects are in the Western North, Oti, Volta, Western, Central, Bono, Ahafo and Eastern regions.