IMANI Ghana is raising serious concerns over a contract awarded to Afriwave Telecom Ghana Limited to provide a common platform for the routing, switching, billing and settlement of interconnect traffic for the telecommunication industry.
These concerns follow similar claims raised by Member of Parliament for Obuasi West, Kweku Kwarteng against the bill on grounds of confidentiality.
[contextly_sidebar id=”AI5lNqWfUJLGWwlSXo4rvB7vcWN9UXVg”]The National Communications Authority (NCA) on December 2, 2014, invited applications for the grant of a license to enable service providers establish, maintain and operate a clearinghouse service for the telecommunication industry.
Five institutions applied for the contract, including; Afriwave Telecom Ghana Limited, Subah Infosolutions, Progidy International Limited, TCMS-GVG Consortium Limited and Channel IT Limited.
But an eight member Application Evaluation Panel (AEP) chaired by Albert E. Enninful, and set up by the NCA to vet the bidders, awarded the contract to Afriwave under circumstances IMANI Ghana says “clearly betrayed the scheme’s parochial intentions.”
In an IMANI Alert issued on Monday, it accused the Application Evaluation Panel of skewing the evaluation processes to ensure that Afriwave won the contract.
It cited the panel’s award of five marks to Afriwave in sections where the marks attainable were ‘1’.
It also said the panel had not visited Afriwave’s operational locations to ascertain their capacity to execute the contract. IMANI thus raises concern that the Panel not only “manipulated raw scores to enable Afriwave emerge as winner of the bid but also [recommended] the granting of a monopoly license to the same company.
According to IMANI, Afriwave also lacks the capacity to undertake and provide a clearinghouse service for the telecommunication industry. It said Afriwave is “involved solely in the mast erection space” and has neither a “Switch nor Routing Platform”, nor a “Fraud Management System” for effective implementation.
The policy think tank is therefore demanding the annulment of entire the application evaluation process, and calling on the “Ministry to re-open the tender and provide adequate time for best practices to be followed in the evaluation of bids.
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By: Sixtus Dong Ullo/citifmonline.com/Ghana