Service to start direct procurement

Public Procurement and Property Disposal Service (PPPDS) has targets to commence direct procurement cutting out middle men on some strategic commodities to tackle challenges that it currently faces.
The Service that is responsible to buy massive federal service and commodity products is currently undertaking the procurement process via international bid that will entertain anybody to involve in the bidding process.
That means suppliers, agents and other third body involve on the bid and shall supply products which are procured from direct producers.
“Such process forced us not to get real price or the price of products will unnecessarily rise because players are not original sellers,” said Tsewaye Muluneh, Director General of PPPDS.
“Traders or brokers that currently supply products add commission on the price,” she added.
Besides that the current way of procurement takes time since it is undertaking on bid, according to Tsewaye.
To solve such challenges the government now preferred to undertake a direct procurement from governments of major suppliers mainly on wheat.
According to Tsewaye, few weeks ago a delegation comprised from relevant government offices and public enterprise have paid a visit in three countries and met government officials there to explain the strategy that the Ethiopian government plans.
A delegation led by Eyob Tekalgne, State Minister of Finance, that include heads of PPPDS, Ethiopian Trading Businesses Corporation, Ethiopia National Disaster Risk Management Commission and advisor of the State Minister visited Australia, Russia and Ukraine and undertook government to government (G2G) meeting.
The main visit of the delegation focus on the process of buying wheat, which is one of the major strategic product the government by every year by allocation of over a half billion dollar.
The aim of the visit is to buy commodities from governments directly that will cut the commission that currently traders add now, according to Tsewaye. “This new strategy will also allow keeping the supply products on continual manner and it is time saving,” she told Capital.
Eyob, who meet with media on Friday January 17, said that the government does not have a plan to continue to import wheat from abroad that will be fully covered by local sources in the coming two years.
“While we shall buy the grain on the G2G manner since we do on other procurements like fuel,” he added.
The bid process needs time that might be followed by claims, which will also include court case, on the bid process, according to the head of PPPDS.
“If we manage direct procurement we shall solve these long processes,” she explained.
“On our visit we have expressed our interest for the stated countries government officials besides observing experiences there,” she added.
PPPDS targets to improve its operation by introducing modern procurement experience adopting from others. Currently it is working with Ministry of Innovation and Technology to come up with automated procurement process that will replace the current manual process.
Tsewaye said that the procurement process of other countries is automated and that makes their activity fast and easy.