DATA from the Ministry of Public Procurement has revealed that out of the 99 sections in the previous Public Procurement Act (PPA), Act 663, about 55 were amended by Parliament.
Speaking in an interview with Today on the sidelines during a press soiree in Accra, Minister of State in-charge of Public Procurement, Ms. Sarah Adwoa Safo, noted that the rest were still sitting in the old Public Procurement law.
Currently, according to the sector minister, government of Ghana had only one law which is the Act 663, enacted in 2003.
She pointed out that government amended this law in Parliament in 2016.
The amended version, he said, was Act 914.
“Now, if anybody wants to get the procurement law of Ghana, you have two documents to deal with; the PPA Act, 2003 (Act 633) and the PPA (Amended) Act, Act 914.
“…this doesn’t augur well for effective reading and comprehension, and again for clarity and interpretation purposes, legally, it is not right,” she noted.
According to Ms. Safo, who is the MP for Dome-Kwabenya, her outfit was working together with the Attorney General’s Department to harmonise these laws into one single document so as to make it essay for the citizenry.
“We are supposed to also come out with a policy document. We have two policies that the government is so committed to implementing. The first one is local content – which we encourage our local industry to make it more competitive for prospective bidders at all times.
“…how do we do that? It is up for my ministry to have a stakeholders’ consultation to come out with a policy document – identify these local industries together with the Ministry of Trade of Industry and build their capacities to make them more competitive,” the Dome-Kwabenya law-maker said.
According to her, it was government’s policy to ensure that “we do that together with our stakeholders.”
She indicated her outfit’s preparedness to interact with media practitioners on government policies and strategies on procurement so that “we are all on the same page when it comes to executing some of these policies of government.”
Ms. Safo asserted that the public procurement plans were at the core of the supply chain.
In this regard, she noted that her ministry would be served with copies of procurement plans of the various entities for the year to enable the ministry monitor their procurement schedules
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