KABUL (SW): One of the government’s efforts to reform the Afghanistan public procurement system was to set up a national procurement authority to create a transparent and effective system. For this reason, the President of the country, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, ordered the creation of this office in the 16th Decree dated 20/7/1393 (12 October 2014). The President, Chief Executive Officer, Second Vice-President, Senior Advisor to the President on Infrastructure, Minister of Finance, Minister of Justice and Minister of Economy are the members at the Special Procurement Commission.
There are four Directorates under the National Procurement Authority (NPA): the Procurement Policy Directorate (PPD), Procurement Facilitation Directorate (PFD), the General Directorate of National Procurement Authority, and the Contracts Progress Monitoring Directorate (CPMD).
To discuss how effective this department has been in contracting or cancelling contracts over the past two or three years, I spoke with Suhail Kakar, the Director of Strategic Communication & Integrity Directorate (SCID) at NPA. Kakar has a small but neat office. While listing contracts, he said that the main task of the NPA is to review large contracts worth more than 20 million AFN. According to Kakar, these contracts are more relevant to the services and goods department.
He pointed to the cabinet in the room and said that this is full of contracts that have been examined. Kakar claimed that over the past three years, the NPA has examined nearly three thousand large contracts, of which more than two and a half thousand contracts have been approved.
Suhail Kakar said the value of contracts which were approved so far reached more than 400 billion AFN which saved more than 19 billion AFN for the government. In the meantime, 50 billion AFN have been prevented from peculation.
Kakar denied the problem of corruption in the NPA and also rejects the issue of delayed reviews of contracts and said that the NPA has 28 days to review a contract. At the end of our conversation, Kakar insisted with confident that corruption doesn’t have a place in this institution.
On the contrary, Abdul Hafiz Mansoor, a member of the lower house of representatives (Wolisi Jirga or WSJ), strongly criticized the work of the National Procurement Authority (NPA) and said that this office is a barrier against the implementation of the major national projects, and according to him many members of the lower house of representatives considered the NPA to be the main reason for many projects not being implemented.
Mansoor said that parliamentary polls showed that in 1395 (2016), budget spending was up to 50 percent. One of the reasons for this was the National Procurement Office that delayed the spending of the budget. According to this member of WSJ, many ministers believed the work of the NPA to be time consuming and admitted that some contracts were postponed even from year to year, and many projects will not be implemented at all.
For further discussion on this issue, I spoke with Nasrullah Alam, a civic society activist, and asked him about the existence and efficiency of the National Procurement Office. Nasrullah Alam regarded the creation of the National Procurement Office an important body in the fight against corruption, but believed that centralizing the economic power in the presidential palace and signing of all the contracts by NPA has created problems in the implementation of projects.
On the one hand, the citizens are calling for national projects to be implemented and they believed that the implementation of large-scale projects can lead to job creation and poverty reduction in the country. On the other hand, both citizens and civil society activists were afraid of the corruption that lies behind the underlying infrastructure projects.
ENDS
