The firm was reportedly awarded a road construction contract in 2013 where they signed the contract and were paid the funds to start work, and one year later they were no longer on the scene. They had signed a contract to build a road from the Kilimanjaro International Airport to the tanzanite mining area of Mirerani in Manyara region, but apparently did nothing on the project.
Recent events relating to faulty contracting or implementation of contracts illustrate how difficult or protracted this business turns out to be, as it appears that there is little more than goodwill that links the government and a contracting party.
A road building bidder who wins a contract may executive it according to terms agreed on the premise that the company has an interest in seeking further work after that, in which case there is a material case for proper execution of contract.
In case the company feels that it will have gained enough from the first payment and doesn’t need to remain in the good books of the agency or the government, it has plenty of room to abandon it.
While it is proper that the agency seeks redress about the specific KIA-Mirerani road dispute, if it is by tracking the firm back home and having it pay for costs incurred as well as reimburse the money, the problem, strictly speaking, isn’t solved. The question is - how come that a company can contract for Sh22bn and be paid on the spot, spend one year visiting northern circuit game parks and then go home to continue with other business, and public powers wake up later and notices the firm isn’t there?
It takes plenty of believing that things can be so easy with the law and both aspects so easy – being paid upfront huge sums of money on one hand, and there being no supervision at all on the other.
Whether or not there are any ideas at upper government levels for the continuation of this sort of contracting or there are workable ideas being considered somewhere is beside the point. It is no gainsaying noting that many people at the upper levels of bureaucracy ought to know what happened. How can Tanroads authorize payment of Sh22bn and stay for one year without being aware what is taking place on that road?
How does the matter surface three years later and we are told that the state is launching a ‘search’ for a fugitive contractor while he should have been arrested in 2013?
If someone is paid the cash in February and hasn’t started work one month later, the regional engineer ought to know what is happening, and indeed he could not have authorized payment unless the contractor was ready to start work right away.
These things look elementary when gazed at from the outside, but intricate and intractable from the inside, and thus keep recurring each year and virtually in all regions. But in the final analysis, this is the face corruption takes, that it works from the inside, looks like laxity, characterized by indulgence at all levels, from the signing of the contract to his escaping unnoticed, only for the authorities to seek a fall guy three years later!
On this score Tanroads should give the country a break.
_0.jpg?itok=QU87XW8D){kind=tracking}
.jpeg?itok=vCj6bCRe)
