Tender board needs 1 000 professionals

The Central Procurement Board of Namibia (CPBN) says it needs about 1 000 professionals to serve on its ad hoc bid evaluation committees.The new tender board also revealed that it was in the process of increasing its current staff by 50% in order to expand its operations since its establishment 15 months ago.“However, to strengthen and enlarge this capacity of the CPBN to evaluate bids across the spectrum of procurement required, we require a pool of approximately 1 000 professionals from where the board could collect the desired mixture of skills and appoint them as an ad hoc evaluation committee,” CPBN chairperson Patrick Swartz said.He said the staff complement had been sufficient for its workload so far, but that the current influx of individual procurement plans (IPPs) necessitated revisiting its recruitment strategy and accelerating the recruitment process. Swartz said the specific areas in which the organisation would require manpower were in its core functional areas - the procurement and certain technical fields.The first round of advertisements closed on 8 June, and more are to follow, Swartz said. He said the CPBN required a pool of experts to evaluate bids on behalf of public entities.According to the new Public Procurement Act, board members may not form part of an evaluation committee. The company so far has 67 professionals, but Swartz said because of the rapid increase of individual procurement plans (IPPs) and the requirement for between three and seven evaluators, the organisation called for more professionals to apply. It has so far received 80 more applications. The CPBN is appealing for applications from engineers, quantity surveyors, architects, pharmacists, accountants, lawyers, IT professionals, geologists and aviation experts, among others. Interested people can access the registration forms on the CPBN's website and forward them to its offices. Procurement Over the last 15 months the CPBN has issued only one tender - for anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) on behalf of the Ministry of Health and Social Services.But this tender was cancelled to ensure that the CPBN had complied with the provisions of the new Public Procurement Act, and that the 13 bidders were given an opportunity to participate in a fair, transparent and competitive bidding process, Swartz said.He said the ARV tender would be awarded soon.“The revised documents have not yet been issued. The board needs to vet the changes in the document that was made,” Swartz said yesterday at a press briefing where he reported on the progress the CPBN has made so far.Since March last year the CPBN has approved 17 IPPs to the value of N$2.5 billion and awarded 28 tender extensions, variation orders, price increases, as well as new procurement awards valued at about N$1.46 billion at its 29 meetings. It approved 18 extensions of contracts to the value of N$848 million, three variation orders amounting to N$21 million, two price increases amount to over N$15 million, and five procurement awards were made to the value of over N$572 million.One of these five awards concluded by the board is a N$111 million tender awarded by the Roads Authority (RA) and is currently being challenged in the High Court by one of the bidders, after the review panel had set aside the CPBN's tender award decision aside. A court ruling in this matter is expected in the next financial year. IPPsPublic entities are responsible for preparing IPPs according to their own strategic plans and budgets. After this, they prepare the bidding documents with the specifications and the evaluation criteria.The CPBN, as procuring agent, then considers whether the specifications and evaluation criteria encourage fair competition and comply with the Public Procurement Act.CATHERINE SASMAN

Tender board needs 1 000 professionals

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Namibian Sun 2025-12-19

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Tender board needs 1 000 professionals

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Namibian Sun 2025-12-19

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