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Mr William Tevie

Licence to Afriwave won’t be reversed — NCA

The telecoms industry regulator, National Communications Authority (NCA), has served notice that it will not reverse the licence granted Afriwave Ghana Limited, the company that won the bid to operate an Interconnect Clearing House (ICH) system in the country.

“The tender evaluation process was conducted in a free and fair manner and the best company won so we will not succumb to pressure from any source to conduct a new process to select a winner,” the Director-General of the NCA, Mr William Tevie, said.

In a brief interview with the Daily Graphic on the matter, he said “the process to select the best company was transparent and I have confidence in the committee that worked on the bids”.

Mr Tevie insisted that the report presented was authentic and, therefore, there was no need to start a new process in search of a winner to operate the ICH.

Controversy

Various groups and individuals have mounted pressure on the NCA in recent days for it to ignore the earlier report that confirmed Afriwave as the winner of the bid to operate the ICH.

For instance, one of the loudest groups, IMANI Ghana, has called into question the integrity of the bidding process which led to the granting of an ICH licence to Afriwave by the NCA.

IMANI held the view that the tender process was rigged by the evaluation panel which manipulated the scoring scheme in favour of Afriwave, to win the bid ahead of Subah Infosolutions, Prodigy International Limited, TCMS-GVG Consortium Limited and Channel IT Ghana Limited.

Using an extract of the evaluation panel’s report to back its claims, IMANI maintained that during the evaluation of technical capability, Afriwave was given more marks than the maximum attainable scores in the constituent areas assessed and that should those marks be removed the tender would be rightly won by Subah Infosolutions.

But the NCA, in an earlier statement, said regulations were adhered to in every aspect of the process.

The NCA said “IMANI based its arguments on a draft report. The 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.”

On the competence of Afriwave, the NCA said applicants for licences were not always required to be operational and Afriwave had letters of commitment and agreements with Huawei Technologies, Meucci Solutions and Laurasia Associates.

Pressure

Mr Tevie said the NCA was not going to succumb to pressure from any quarters regarding the tender process that was conducted, saying “we stand by our work and what we have done will remain”.

He will not draw any conclusions as to whether the losers of the bid were using the public to mount pressure to have the entire tender process reversed.

“To us, we have done what is necessary in a transparent manner and the results declaring Afriwave as winner will stay,” he said.

Subah contract

Mr Tevie said Subah Info Solutions had been served notice that its licence would not be renewed when its contract expired by May this year.

“The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) has served Subah notice and, therefore, they are aware”, he said.

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