The Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Authority (PPDA) has urged Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies to embrace e-Government Procurement, saying it has come to stay,

Director General of the PPDA Edington Chilapondwa, PhD made the remarks in Salima during the opening of the training session aimed at fully onboarding the MDAs onto the Malawi National Electronic Procurement System (MANePS).

Chilapondwa said Malawi’s economy is bleeding due to pilferage of public resources through procurement fraud among other things, such that the e-GP has come to solve some of the challenges.

He said there is need for systems that should safeguard taxpayers’ money against what he called ‘authorized structured chaos and that MANePs is one such system and asked all the public entities to take the system seriously.

“e-GP is the only way we can curb leakage of government resources through mis-procurement. We cannot watch under our nose someone registering for arguments sake six companies which are seen competing among themselves for government bids,” Chilapondwa said.

He reiterated that the e-GP is a government system designed to help government manage its procurement processes by detecting all fraudulent processes by holding all bids by government departments.

According to Chilapondwa the PPDA exists just to lead implementation of the system which he said solely belongs to the public entities, hence the need to embrace it fully.

“This digital platform crucial to stopping resource leakages, restoring order in public purchasing, and reducing corruption. You will notice that it addresses long-standing challenges faced with the paper-based procurement system such as poor record keeping,” Dr, Chilapondwa explained.

The PPDA is implementing the Performance For Results (PFORR)Project under the Digital Malawi Project the Authority in partnership with the Public Private Partnership Commission (PPPC) with funding from the World Bank.