The Ministry of Health and Social Services has proposed stringent financial capacity vetting against tenderpreneurs tendering for projects, saying absence of such vetting often leads to incomplete service delivery.
The Ministry’s stance comes following weeks of criticism due to dilapidated infrastructure, non-functional equipment, lack of medicines and human resource shortage.
The Ministry’s Executive Director Ben Nangombe said his office was doing its utmost to address the crisis but faced an upheaval battle of contractors’ poor performance and lack of cash flow and technical capacity.
“As a Ministry, we have recommended the strengthening of the evaluation criteria to ensure only suppliers with technical and financial capacity are employed. It is further resolved to debar non-performing contractors from being awarded new projects. as well as Implement penalties as per the signed contract,” he said.
“Careful analysis on lowest bids before they are awarded, and also recommend to the Development Bank of Namibia to restructure the funding system, while further creating a system to trace procurement requests.”
Nangombe said the ministry faces challenges such as poor performance of contractors due to a lack of cash flow and technical capacity to employ sufficient workforce and buy sufficient materials to make sufficient progress as well as lengthy procurement process to advertise, evaluate and award bids.
About 636 procurement activities were carried out by the ministry between April 2022 and March this year.
For 2023/24, the Ministry awarded another procurement of 20 dental chairs, 20 dental x-ray units, 20 dental sensors, and 18 dental autoclaves, which will be installed at various facilities.
