By PB Jayasumana –

So many skeletons in the cupboard, one is at a loss to know where to start.

Way back in 2005, the World Bank funded several countries including Sri Lanka to automate its government procurement processes knowing that it is a crucial ingredient of being transparent and accountable to the people. In order to do that however, some prerequisites had to be installed: an independent National Procurement Authority (NPA) and legislation which came in the form of the now well-known, NPA Guidelines of 2006 for Sri Lanka.

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Champions and Villains

A single individual, who then assumed the powerful office of the Secretary to the Treasury (ST) had other ideas, and for reasons best known to him dismantled the whole process and got rid of the NPA, only retaining its guidelines document, which has since been used by all government agencies for procurement.

In 2017, owing to a certain champion within the state system, its Director General of Public Finance, Sri Lanka hosted the Fourth South Asia Regional Public Procurement Conference, where we had to admit with some shame, the truth that we were no closer to achieving transparency in government procurement than we were in 2006! Countries which had begun the process much later, had gone well ahead of Sri Lanka by this time. The aforementioned champion, then reached out to the University of Colombo to help the government to begin the process of automating procurement under a new Cabinet Memorandum in 2018. After initially assisting in drafting the initial documentation for this, a then university affiliated company, now completely independent, was asked by the donor agency, the World Bank, to assist by implementing a prototype of a system based on international best practice as already launched as an open-source software called Prozorro. The World Bank itself, by then had tried two approaches in helping developing countries to implement eGovernment Procurement (eGP) systems: using off-the-shelf solutions based on SAP and Oracle and negotiating to transfer the most successful South Korean eGP system to other countries. Both these having failed, their extensive study of what actually worked in countries made them conclude that only ‘home grown’ systems, with which the country itself ‘grows’ had been successful. A case study of Georgia was then proposed as a possible model for Sri Lanka to follow, where initially just 4 developers put together a software to run the country’s national eGP system!

March towards transparency

Based on this, Sri Lanka began its implementation of an eGP in 2019 and the first version, based on this international best practice, was launched in 2020 to handle procurements in the National Shopping category (at that point with a ceiling or Rs. 20m) – which has the highest traffic in terms of the number of tenders transacted. The only reason for not being able to also launch National and International Competitive Bidding (NCB and ICB), which has much less transactional traffic, was the absence of the necessary legislation!

By this time, the aforementioned process champion was removed from the position by the powerful former ST, who was by now the Secretary to the President! It would be fair to say that this single individual was the reason for the benefits of transparent government procurement was withheld from the people of this country for up to two decades! The eGP process then went into ‘stall mode’ with lots of incompetent officials being put in charge of the new eGP Secretariat set up under the Department of Public Finance of the Ministry of Finance. One such ‘red herring’ was to enlist a ‘procurement specialist’ who evaluated the system, which had by then transacted over 5000 government procurements including some 40 of the National Competitive Bidding category (before they realized that Sri Lanka didn’t have the required legislation for it!). This ‘specialist’ concluded that Sri Lanka’s procurement was ‘different’ and so the eGP Secretariat gave new specifications for what became known as eGP 2.0 spec in 2021. Various processes ensued and after signing various addendums to the original contract, version 2.1 was launched in early 2024 according to these new Sri Lankan specifications. With over 40,000 government procurements transacted, reaching over 800 procurements a week, with government officers involved in procurement working even during weekends (and Poya days) to execute procurements on time in this completely transparent eGP system which can be accessed by the public via promise.lk, the new eGP Secretariat plans to cancel the project this month! This reeks of a textbook case of deception, incompetence and yet, the ability to mislead government. The leadership of the eGP would need to be investigated with at least one of its powerful members being a known deal maker by the IT industry.

Not to distract from the argument, but the ‘service partner’ for implementing and deploying this functional system with an originally contracted value of simply Rs. 70m (later updated to Rs. 130m) has been paid only Rs. 16m for all its efforts. It has persisted up to now, purely because of the clear perceived benefits to the people, especially when the system is provisioned in addition for the large tenders under NCB and ICB.

Sabotaging the march

It seems apparent at this point that the officials of the eGP Secretariat are misleading a government which is committed to transparency and accountability to the people, by making various unfounded and misleading allegations against the software service partner. It is understood that the Secretariat has tried to convince the government that the service partner will only complete the project by 2030, when the system is already running and only awaits the legislation required to run NCB and ICB tenders – something that has been slow in being enacted since 2020 owing to the eGP Secretariat and the Department of Public Finance of the Ministry of Finance.

In addition, contrary to international best practice, the eGP Secretariat has no qualms about hosting Sri Lanka’s procurement information in the public could, even though our Sri Lankan cloud providers are perfectly capable of providing this level of service (which doesn’t require millions of transactions per minute as is the case with eBay or Amazon). Mixing up international best practice in terms of what works on the ground for this specific use case and that of global high throughput platforms, is what even the technical experts at ICTA appear to be doing.

Dealing now, and dealing swiftly

It is ironic that, during Sri Lanka’s fresh start on accountability and transparency, the Finance Ministry, through its Department of Public Finance, and specifically the eGP Secretariat is bent on sending the country back by 2 to 3 years and many millions of dollars by sabotaging the present ‘home grown’ working eGP system, in pursuit of some utopian dream of a perfect system that a more ‘profitable’ service provider may be able to offer!

The present ‘service partner’ is confident that it is only legislation which holds back the Sri Lankan government from launching all procurements – especially the large ones, using the existing system, within 2026, as the technology stack will not change (something that the non-technical staff of the eGP cannot fully fathom).

This is an investigation that the government would be well advised to immediately launch to prevent the country not fully leveraging the results of empowering the people with true government procurement transparency.