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Uganda: Govt Sued Over IDs Project
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The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
21 March 2008
Posted to the web 21 March 2008
Elias Biryabarema
South African company Face Technologies has served the government with a notice of intention to sue seeking to recover Ush87 billion for freezing its contract to make national identity cards thereby causing financial loss to the company.
According to the notice served to the Attorney General, Face Technologies (FT) claims the government committed itself when it offered them the tender to manage the National Population Databank and Identification System (NPDIS), but failed to proceed with the contract.
Through the project, the government intends to issue IDs to citizens for easy verification of identity, age, domiciliary, modernise the national registration systems - birth rates, death rates and such like and aid the provision of e-government services.
It is not clear why for two years since the government wrote to FT on January 5, 2006 informing the management that the company had emerged the best bidder, no explanation has been given as to why it did not proceed to sign the contract.
However, in an interview on Tuesday, Finance Minister Ezra Suruma said the government never signed a contract with FT because it believed the firm had inflated its costs.
"We would have spent a lot of money if we had gone ahead to sign a contract with Face Technologies," he said. FT says in its notice that: "The instruction to tenders of the project provides that notification of award will constitute the formation of the contract," reads part of the notice.
Dr Suruma, too, didn't sound bothered that the government might pay even higher if FT succeeds in its litigation, but sounded confident that both parties would reach an amicable settlement.
"We believe we can spend much less on that project. So we'll see how to work it out," he said. There is a real possibility that even if the matter is resolved in court or out of court, the government might still have to pay FT taxpayers' money. â-¨
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â-¨FT claims the government concluded negotiations with them in January 2006 "and that was specified as the date of the formal contract."
"The plaintiff made all the human, financial, technical and logistical preparations for immediate implementation bearing in mind that the first deliverables were expected within six months," reads the notice dated February 8, 2008.
The notice also accuses the government of "breach of bidding terms." According to the notice, FT was denied the right to implement the project on grounds of investigations that they didn't institute and as a result they have been subjected to loss and damages.
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