Imani calls for review of Afriwave contract; But NCA says claims misleading

IMANI Ghana has called for a review of the contract awarded to Afriwave Telecom Ghana Limited by the National Communications Authority (NCA) for the establishment of the Ghana Interconnect Clearing House platform.

It alleged that the system was manipulated in favour of Afriwave and  appealed to the President and the Minister of Communications to take steps to redeem the credibility of the whole process.

In a statement, IMANI said documents in its possession clearly vindicated the red-flag the think-tank raised earlier  about the project.

But, the NCA has described the allegation made by IMANI as misleading.

In a statement copied to the Daily Graphic yesterday, it said there was nothing fishy about the contract and accused IMANI of only trying to throw dust into the eyes of the public.

The Ghana Clearing House platform will provide a common platform for routing, switching, billing and settlement of interconnect traffic as well as other important services for both current and future operations in the country.

Tender process
But, taking a walk through the tender process, IMANI said it was surprising that such a complex process took only 21 days.

'On the 2nd of December 2014, the NCA invited applications for the grant of a licence to enable service providers to establish, maintain and operate clearing house services in Ghana's telecommunications industry.

'By the 17th of December 2014, which was the deadline of the hurriedly arranged tender application process, a total of five applicants had been received according to the Application Evaluation Panel (AEP) report,' the statement said.

It mentioned the names of the applicants as Afriwave, Subah Infosolutions, Prodigy International Limited, TCMS-GVG Consortium Limited, and Channel IT Ghana Limited.

According to IMANI, it was strange that the report submitted by the eight-member AEP chaired by Mr Albert E. Enninful on January 29, 2015 was quickly endorsed by the chairman of the NCA the following day without recourse to a review.

'For such a complex undertaking, the 21-day timeframe used to review detailed technical and financial submissions from five companies competing to manage such a critical system as a monopoly interconnect clearing house system was not only merely ridiculous, it was farcical,' the statement said.

Evaluation panel admission
It stated that the fact that the evaluation panel admitted in its report, the absence of a pre-qualification spoke volumes of the dubious nature of the contract.

'So in addition to the NCA never having reviewed the report of the evaluation panel, the panel also had no prior guidance whatsoever from the NCA's technical staff to assist in its work.

'There were no visits whatsoever to any of the applicants' operational locations or premises to ascertain their existing capacity. There were no client references or testimonials of previous work done in clearing and general telecom intermediation space. In fact, there were no references of any kind at all,' IMANI wrote.

'Real meat'
In what IMANI described as 'the real meat' in the dubious contract, it accused the panel of manipulating their own scoring system in favour of Afriwave when it was all clear that Subah infosolutions came up tops.

'Afriwave was awarded five marks in a section where the total available marks were 'one'. This is the part where the applicants were to show that their operational support team for the planned undertaking is up to scratch by presenting their CVs.

'This is on top of the fact that Subah having won all the two points available in the Project Implementation Team subscore, compared to Afriwave's score of one, it was highly irregular for Afriwave to have been declared as having a superior operational support team given how interlinked the two requirements are,' IMANI submitted.

Besides, it pointed out that although Afriwave was only engaged in mast erection, the panel sought to indicate rather strangely that it evaluated the company's switch and routing platform and fraud management system.

'Which switch, routing and anti-fraud systems exactly were reviewed?' IMANI questioned, and went ahead to provide the answer, 'Our understanding is that this evaluation was carried out on diagrams submitted by the parties.'

Other scores IMANI mentioned to underline its accusation of fraud in the award of the contract included the equipment identity register subscore, which even though had a maximum score of one, saw Afriwave being awarded four marks as against one mark for Subah.

The statement continued, 'Despite 'topology scalability' having a maximum subscore of one, Afriwave was awarded two marks. Despite evidence of Telco interconnections having a maximum subscore of two, Afriwave was awarded four marks.'

'Likewise, the requirement to provide a critical bill of quantity could only be scored a maximum of one, yet, here too, Afriwave was given two marks.'

IMANI said an aggregation of the score revealed that Afriwave was awarded 11 extra points for technical performance, which it could not demonstrate and added that in reality,  Afriwave should have obtained 67.2 points and not the 78.2 points that illegally won it the contract, which was lower than the reported score of 72.7 for Subah Infosolutions.

NCA's response
Giving a background to the project, the NCA said the Ministry of Communications (MOC) requested from the NCA, policy advice on Clearinghouse, International Wholesale Carriers, Mobile Virtual Network Operators and Fixed Access Service Operators.

'The MOC then tabled a memorandum regarding the four licences including clearing house services to cabinet for deliberation. Cabinet discussed the memorandum accordingly and satisfied with the propriety of the proposed policy, in August 2014, gave approval for the implementation of the policy. The ministry, therefore, conveyed the Cabinet approval to the authority and accordingly issued a directive to the NCA to implement the policy.

The statement said the authority went ahead to meet the board chairmen and CEOs of the telecom operators in September 2014 to outline and discuss the rationale, modalities, benefits of the process while  a public forum was also held on November 26, 2014 on it and a presentation was made to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications.

Application process
It said the application process was also open and that each of the five applicants were given the opportunity to make submissions on their bids and in addition provide answers to further queries.

'Afriwave Ghana Limited, a wholly owned Ghanaian Company with Laurisia Associates as its integration partner, Huawei and Muecci as its technology partners, won the bid to be licensed as the Clearinghouse Services Provider in Ghana for the next 10 years, ' it said, and explained that the company provided the most satisfactory responses against the  other applicants.

'Afriwave, has since installed and integrated their system with that of all Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to ensure a continuous and smooth transition period when the contract of Subah Info Solutions ends in May, 2016.

'It should also be noted that, Afriwave is not being paid for the installation and testing of their system and as such, there has been no duplication of payment or any financial loss to the state. The essence of this exercise is to prevent potential financial loss to the state that may be occasioned by an abrupt pull out by Subah at the expiration of its contract.

It indicated that IMANI based their arguments on a draft report. 'NCA in the preparation of the report, transposed the scores from Excel to Microsoft Word and noticed that there were some transpositional errors, which were corrected to correspond with the original Excel scores.

'We are not sure where IMANI got their information from, and we would like to plead with the general public to ensure that they get their information from the right sources, in this case from the NCA. Furthermore, we note that even the draft report that IMANI has in its possession answers all the questions that they asked, so we are amazed that IMANI fails to make reference to the said responses, however, we will provide some answers below,' the NCA stated.

On licensing, the NCA said, 'it should be noted that applicants for licences are not always required to be operational as of the time of submitting their applications, especially for new licences or new entrants.  What the applicants need to submit as per the application process is to demonstrate their technical and financial capabilities. In the past, the NCA had awarded licences to new entrants who had gone on to operate and had delivered services as per the licences they were awarded.'