By Tabora Bojang
The Edward Francis Small Centre for Right and Justice has warned that the decision by the GPPA to exempt nine public institutions from seeking approval to procure goods and services, could weaken checks and balances and exacerbate corruption and self-enrichment in public institutions.
Nine more institutions were on Friday authorized to henceforth conduct their procurement activities on their own with approvals for procurement activities to be granted by heads of institutions.
But according to the group, procurement and anti-corruption experts have noted that in most countries, the abuse of government-spending processes has become the gateway to self-enrichment. “The Gambia is one example of such self-enrichment through procurement. The evidence of this could be found in the series of audits of public institutions by the National Audit Office, with the latest being the special audit of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). Yet IEC is one of the institutions to be exempted from seeking prior GPPA approval,” EFSCRJ said in a statement shared with The Standard yesterday.
According to the group, the laws the GPPA is relying on to grant these exemptions were first inserted in the GPPA Act in 2014, and then maintained in the 2022 amendments as part of the functions of GPPA but were never part of the original GPPA Act 2001.
The group demanded the Authority to disclose the reports of “the capacity assessments conducted” for each of these institutions and for the Minister of Finance to review the amendment of the GPPA Act to remove the entire sections that legitimize these exemptions, which is a breathing room for “bribery and corruption.”
“We note with concern the high incidence of bribery and corruption in Government procurement which has been incontrovertibly evidenced in audit reports, commissions of inquiry, and reports by CSOs and investigative journalists. The GPPA Act, with the presence of Sections 12(4) to (7), effectively legitimize and legalize bribery and corruption which must hugely concern the Government,” the group said.
