A tendering process for green power kicked off last month that aims to allow for feeding into the national grid as early as next year. But the fact that the Request for Procurement (RFP) document requires bidders to sign a confidentiality clause has aroused transparency concerns.
The energy department said its intention was to protect commercial information and prevent collusion, but public-finance experts are baffled by the clause and worry that it offers opportunities for corruption.
The confidentiality agreement requires that bidders do not share RFP documents (which are provided only after a R15 000 registration fee has been paid) or divulge any information. Bidders are not permitted to disclose even that they intend to place a bid.
At a media briefing on Wednesday the department’s acting deputy-director general, Ompi Aphane, said it was never the intention to “hide things from the public”. There was, however, certain commercial information in the documents that providers wanted protected from competitors.
Because price is a bidding consideration, Aphane said, the confidentiality clause was an additional measure to avoid collusion.
Derek Luyt, acting director of the Public Service Accountability Monitor at Rhodes University, said it was fairly standard for confidentiality clauses to be used so that suppliers were not allowed to divulge information before the winning bid had been disclosed. But he said it was odd for this to be applied to bidders and even more odd that it was applied to renewables.
“I would be extremely wary of this [confidentiality clause],” Luyt said. “We don’t want renewables to get sucked in too.”
Gavin Woods, professor of public finance and director of the University of Stellenbosch’s anticorruption centre, said he could not see how such a confidentiality clause would be able to circumvent collusion. It was likely that it was part of government’s constant revision of tender-procurement rules — a reaction to ongoing and pervasive tender fraud — but might be a misguided measure. “They naively expect that tighter anti-corruption rules and regulations mean people will automatically comply.”
Research by the anticorruption centre showed there were simply too many opportunities for corruption in government departments. “Nothing is done about these opportunities and they remain open. Additional rules do not change that.”
The Independent Power Producers’ (IPP) Procurement Programme, known as Rebid, last month replaced a Renewable Energy Feed-In Tariff (Refit) programme, in which bidders would be asked to bid for projects based on fixed tariffs.
The new, two-phase tender system requires bidders first to meet qualifications and then be evaluated on bid price and economic-development objectives.
Energy department director general Neliswe Magubane told the press there was no legal prohibition against bidding by political parties.