Corruption is another issue

Hi again,

Corruption is an epidemic in the government of Afghanistan. Residents of the country complain that they cannot pay a simple electricity bill without giving bribes. International community is also complaining that they do not see the impact of the aid due to the vast corruption in the government. Meanwhile, government is doing its best, at least they claim, to stop corruption but all is in vain.

One of the areas that is heavily affected by corruption is procurement. Few people dealing with procurement would be considered innocent. The common notion among people is that anyone working in the procurement, misuses the procedures and earns extra money. It is not proved but the reality is that many of the guys working in the procurement get richer than normal.

The disturbing fact is that even the agencies that are created to tackle with corruption are involved in corruption. Police, attorneys and other anti-corruption agencies are as much accused as any other agencies. Recently, a new agency called the High Office of Oversight was created for this purpose but it has not helped so far.

I am not sure if this is the case in other post-war countries as well. We are kind of out of the war but not out of the corruption.  

Regards,

Javid    

Problems continued...

Hi,

I complained about the procedures of recruitment in my earlier blogs. Moreover, finding qualified candidates is another problem. However, I faced another bigger problem than this- procurement.

Procurement of goods and services is a very complicated area. There are so many policies and procedures involved. There are so many signatures needed.

One has to announce the Request for Expression of Interest for 3 weeks. Collect the REoIs and make a shortlist. Then you have to get the No Objection Letter (NoL) from the donor for the shortlist. It is worth mentioning that the short is made by a committee which is assigned either by The Minister or Deputy Minister. Then the project has to prepare Request for Proposal (RFP) and give it to the shortlisted companies. You have to give them at least 40 days so they can prepare good proposals. Once again, a committee is assigned to select the best proposal based on technical skills and financial expenses. All this has to go for NoL again to the donor. All this process takes almost 4 months.

The dangerous part in the procurement process is corruption which I will discuss in my later blogs. However, what I want to say here is that we experience many things that we do not think about when we are studying.

Thanks,

Javid