It could be recall that Policy think tank IMANI Ghana has claimed the processes leading to the award of the contract were fraudulent.
The NCA has challenged that claim in a statement indicating that
“1. Claim: the 21-day timeframe allocated for the Evaluation panel to carry out its work was too limited for a proper job to be done.
Response: This process began with extensive public consultations as far back as November, 2014. This involved meetings and fora held with industry players, Telcos, Parliament, Civil Society Organizations and other stakeholders.The process involved the issuance of a licence to render a specific set of services and the NCA based on its over two decades of experience in regulating the sector is confident that the time allotted for the process was adequate to allow for the necessary scrutiny as expertly done by the AEP.
2. Claim: The Evaluation panel itself admits in its report that no pre-qualification was done. The NCA never reviewed the report of the Evaluation Panel and they had no prior guidance from the NCA ‘s technical staff to assist it in its work.
Response: This claim is not only false, it is also fraudulent. The Evaluation panel did not make the admission attributed it. The panel in fact stated at page 12 of its report in section 2.5.1 under Stage One: Pre-qualification (Administrative) that
“The AEP observed that the administrative pre-qualification of applicants required in stage one of the process had not been done by commencement of work. The AEP decided that the two stages be combined into one process for the purpose of the evaluation.”
The results of the Stage One pre-qualification is found in Table 4 at page 14 of the report and the public is encouraged to scrutinize it.
The claim that the NCA never reviewed the report is also fraudulent. The report was presented to the Board of the NCA on 29th January 2015 and was reviewed over a two-day period between 29th to 30th January 2016 after which it was approved. The claim that the panel did not have any guidance at all in its work from the NCA is false given that the Chairman of the Panel was Mr. Albert Enninful, Deputy Director-General of the NCA, and an Engineer by profession with vast experience.
3. Claim: There were no visits whatsoever to any of the applicants’ operational locations or premises to ascertain existing capacity.
Response: This is the very first time that a process was being undertaken to award a licence for an Interconnect Clearinghouse Service. Given that no known Ghanaian company had performed the full range of services required under the licence to be awarded, the issue of previous capacity was not a requirement as none existed at the time in Ghana. The ability of the participants to perform the functions required was therefore based on the strength of their financial and technical capabilities demonstrated in their applications.
4. Claim: There were no client references or testimonials of previous work done in the clearing and general telecom intermediation space. In fact, there were no references of any kind at all.
Response: Again, given that Interconnect Clearinghouse Services is a novelty in Ghana, none of the companies who applied for the licence, had any prior record of having rendered the full range of fourteen different services required under the licences either in Ghana or any other country for that matter which could form the basis of a testimonial or reference.
5. Claim: The panel manipulated its own scoring scheme to ensure that Afriwave came on top, regardless the actual results. In some instances, Afriwave was given marks over and above the maximum score awardable in a particular section.
Response: The NCA categorically rejects this claim. It is false and constitutes yet another fraudulent attempt by Imani to alter public documents for reasons best known to them. As noted above the Evaluation Panel has authenticated the results contained in the report as representing the true outcome of their work.
The detailed results of the evaluation is captured in Table 15 at page 60 to 65.This table gives a breakdown of all the marks obtained by all five applicants in each category of assessment. We wish to stress that at no point in this report did any mark awarded to any of the applicants exceed the maximum awardable score.
As a further step to show the falsehood inherent in this particular claim by Imani, we have published the excel spreadsheets on which individual scores of individual evaluators were recorded.
We also wish to reiterate that the mention of “transpositional errors” in our earlier encounter with the media was in respect of errors in the column of Subah Infosolutions Limited, which were detected and corrected by the AEP prior to the submission of the final report to the NCA Board. Evidence of this correction was provided in the form of email correspondence among members of the panel during the press conference held on Wednesday 10th February 2016.”
NCA urged the media and the general public to at all times contact the Authority for clarifications required on any matter relating to its functions.
However, other groups including OccupyGhana have also asked NCA to publicize the full report on the Afriwave contract.
In view of that the full report has been made available:
Click To Download Full Report
Source: Newsghana.com.gh
