By Mama A. Touray
An engineer and head of the planning unit at the Basse Area Council (BsAC) has claimed that most of the contracts that the council awarded were at variance with due process.
Mr. Yaya T.B. Touray last week appeared before the Local Government Commission at the Djembe hotel, where he told the commissioners that the former chairman of BsAC and staff personally awarded contracts to people they knew.
According to him, the ex-chairman of BsAC Foday Danjo in 2020, awarded the contract for the drilling of boreholes for the seven districts of the Upper River Region (URR) to a contractor he personally brought.
“This is not a normal process of awarding contracts,” the witness told the commission.
The witness adduced that the council’s contracts committee was dormant and also faulted the awarding of over a D3m contract to Green Vision for the construction of the Baja Kunda Road. He explained that the award of the contract to Green Vision to build the road did not follow due process.
Touray also testified that the council’s revenue collection devices were provided by 5C Energy but that he could not remember whether the contracts committee sat over it.
Earlier in his testimony, the commissioners discovered that BsAC awarded millions of Dalasi’s worth of contracts without any documents in the bidding file to show that the awarding of the contracts followed due process. This includes the D3,928,405.00 contract for the Baja Kunda Road project, D4,189,681.8 contract for the construction of Samba Lolo Bridge, D4,897,125.8 for the construction of Song KundaBridge, D2,942,520.00 for the construction Sare-Mansong-SareBojo feeder road and D18,453,540 for the Manneh Kunda Road. These contracts were awarded at bid prices to Green Vision, Longian Road Construction, Golden Quarry, and Auto-Civil Engineering.
Sittings resume today.