The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) has commenced investigations on the circumstances which caused the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) to cancel mid way the entire procurement process for its road maintenance contracts for this financial year.
This is after suspicion emerged that KWS management and senior officials from the Ministry of Tourism had their preferred contractors for the projects leading to a complaint being filed at PPRA and the Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi’s office.
KWS is responsible for over 10,000 kilometres of road network, out of which 2,450Km are regularly maintained under Kenya Roads Board funding.
In December last year, the agency invited bids from interested contractors to apply for routine maintenance of 42 roads inside Kenya’s national parks and game reserves.
The tender attracted bids from a total of 880 construction companies. The tendering process was closed on December 15, 2023 at 10 am. The bids were opened in the prescence of the representatives from all companies that applied at the KWS headquarters along Langata Road.
Those in the know say that while the process was free from flaws up to this moment, the procurement committee was put under immense pressure to award contracts to 45 preferred countries by KWS management.
However, none of these 45 companies had passed the criteria set out by the procurement committee. This led to a fall out between the tendering committee and the Head of Procurement Leah Naisoi who was being pressured by the Director General Erastus Kanga to do the bidding for preferred contractors.
The tendering committee however stuck to its guns and declined to clear the 45 companies. Unable to get their preferred companies win the tenders, KWS management decided to strangely cancel the whole tender without sufficient reason.
Ms Naisoi then wrote a standard letter to all 880 bidders informing them that they had been unsuccesfull.
“We regret to inform you that none of your bids was succesful,” wrote Naisoi to all contractors without informing them why their bids were unsucessul as required by procurement laws.
All government agencies are required by PPRB to inform each bidder of a contract on why their bid was not successful. Additionally, they are required to inform the loosing bidders who won the tender in their place, and also list every company that had placed a bid.
Furthermore, it is also very strange that all 880 contractors failed in their bids as this has never ever happened at KWS.
Infact one of the companies that lost has reported the matter to PPRB prompting a full scale investigation on the reason why KWS has decided to freeze spending of taxpayers money on the maintenance of its roads due to a procurement dispute.
