Over the past month, Nepalese journalist Narayan Manandhar has waged a lonely battle to call attention to irregularities in the procurement of consulting services by the Ministry of Local Development. The irony? The bid, which received applications from national and international consultants, was for a contract to implement the services of the Local Governance Accountability Facility (LGAF) – an agency charged with increasing citizen capacity to hold local governments accountable.
According to Manandhar, LGAF began requesting proposals for the contract in January and listed a master’s degree as the minimum required qualification for the hiring of personnel. In March, six firms were pre-qualified for submission of technical and financial proposals. However, the request for proposal document had downgraded the qualifications for personnel to a bachelor’s degree. A discrepancy that would otherwise have gone unnoticed left Manandhar uneasy about the transparency of the bidding system. Although the “mistake” was corrected after Manandhar published an article in the Kathmandu Post in April, Manandhar is not convinced that this was a simple technical error on the LGAF’s part.
Manandhar told Global Integrity that he and another concerned Nepali citizen, Mr. Adhasha Tuladhar, have been the only two outspoken critics of the LGAF’s corrective procedure. And it has not been easy to voice their unpopular views. In an email to Global Integrity, Manandhar stated, “I have been told (I am) ‘blowing things out of proportion’ or ‘why I am a lone voice raising this issue?’ It is no wonder in a country where recovery of bribe money is taken as a successful anti-corruption campaign, the correction of a ‘small technical problem’ is enough to (absolve them) from their responsibilities.”
Manandhar wrote a letter to the editor of the Kathmandu Post on April 13th, which was never published. However, his follow-up letter to the editor, entitled “Deception Continued,” was published. In this version, he firmly states his views that this is “a a serious violation of global competitive bidding system”:
“The issue here is not on triviality of when and where the [corrective] letter was issued, whether the issued letter bore any official stamp or not, or on the contents and intents of the letter. The issue here is: Is this an appropriate way to correct the error made in a global procurement call? Should not public be notified about the mistake? What about the rights to know of those firms who were not pre-qualified? Is not there a need to investigate on this incompetence? Is not this true in light of recent MRP fiasco?”
You can read Mandahar’s full letter to the editor and the Chairman of the LGAF’s response to Mandahar both published in the Kathmandu Post. Also, see the Global Integrity Report: 2009 for more on Nepali procurement practices.
— Emilie Yam
Dear Adarsha,
I was interested, saddened but not surprised by your account.
I was contracted by DFID Nepal in a role that encompassed fiduciary accountability related tasks.
I found a serious reluctance to address these issues, and an offer to discuss specifics was not responded to by either the head of DFID Nepal or one of DFID's Senior Management team in London.
After six months trying, I had to call it a day – not least because it was clear that the culture and ethos of DFID Nepal is inconsistent with its stated aims and principles.
Yes indeed I had also written two letters (on April 5 and 15) to Editor in another English daily The Himalayan Times and one to the Kathmandu Post on April 13 regarding the same subject.
In my letter from April 15 I have raised a question which I myself had faced while working as the Project Coordinator of DFID-funded and Pro Public-executed "Civil Society Anti-corruption Project". It related to a 'success story' which I had narrated to the select audience comprising none other than the Ambassador of the UK to Nepal and the then DFID Country Director. The success story was about how during the public hearing organized by the project in one of the project districts the Users Committee Chairperson of the Water Supply Project was accused by the members of the same committee of embezzling NRs 400,000. and the public were demanding refund of that amount from the accused. The accused had admitted embezzling the amount but he insisted that he had embezzled less than the said amount so he insisted on refunding only NRs 350,000.
The organizers of the public hearing as well as the attending public were elated at the 'success' in having the accused confess to the embezzlement and in getting refunded a substantial amount which otherwise had been embezzled.
But His Excellency the Ambassador had asked me two questions: a) whether the public and the organizers of the public hearing had the right to agree to the reduced amount? and b) whether the accused who had admitted embezzling the money can be let free without being prosecuted as per the law of the land?
I had no answer and when I put this question to some of the top officials in Pro Public they also did not have an answer. This confirmed the general Nepali psyche of rather lenient approach towards "embezzlement" in general and the "forgiving nature" once someone has admitted to wrongdoing.
I had narrated this story in my letter and tried to relate it to the story about deception in LGAF with a view to preempting the same questions in case the Ministry issued an explanation letter on the subject. Indeed, there followed a letter from the LGAF admitting to the overlook but the matter ended there: no further investigation into the matter. The consortium of donors supporting the LGAF had remained silent and so also the main anti-corruption agency – the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority – where a formal complaint was lodged.
So, the big question is who is interested to tackle corruption? Obviously no body.