The federal government's bid to import desperately needed consumer goods seems to be going from bad to worse as procument processes to buy wheat, sugar, and rice faltered last week.

Only one supplier, Promising International, showed up during the bid opening last week for procurement tenders floated in March this year by the Ministry of Trade & Industry.

With the rising cost of living, driven largely by upward prices for food items, authorities at the federal government are under pressure to stablise the market. Over the past three years alone, Ethiopia has imported an average 1.2 million metric tons of wheat a year, excluding food aid, which accounted for about 30pc of the domestic consumption. Last year, the federal government imported 1.7 million tonnes of wheat.

A procurement process, which would ordinarily have been carried out by the Federal Public Procurement & Property Disposal Service (PPPDS), was instead made to be floated by the Ministry to speed up the procurements on behalf of the Ethiopian Trading Business Corporation (ETBC) and the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation (ESC).

The Office of the Prime Minister made the decision.

Officials at the ministries of Trade & Industry and Finance were not available to comment on the rationale behind the structuring of the tenders.

Partitioned in three lots - 400,000tn for wheat grain, 170,000tn for parboiled rice, and 320,000tn for sugar - the committee in charge of the procurement process for wheat saw an offer only from the Dubai-based company when the bid was opened on April 20, 2021. Promising International was one of the 50 prospective suppliers that have bought the bid documents.

Promising, a frequent wheat supplier to Ethiopia, was blacklisted due to a dispute with PPPDS for failing to deliver on a bid for 200,000tn of wheat awarded in 2018. A recent favorable court ruling, however, has allowed Promising to get back into procurement activities.

Usually, when bids are announced for wheat procurement, many suppliers place their respective bids, despite dozens buying the documents. None of the suppliers in the three lots have provided bid bonds, along with other technical documents, according to Tsewaye Muluneh, director-general of PPPDS and a member of the technical committee, comprising members from the Ministry, PPPDS, and ETBC.

"It's a basic and primary requirement for bidders," said Tsewaye.

The technical committee has done its analysis and reported to the approval committee, according to her.

There was a mishap during the submission of the documents where a bid bond worth 500,000 Br was placed in the financial document rather than separately, according to representatives of Promising International.

"These things happen," said Habtamu Million, a local representative of Promising International.

The reluctance by the suppliers to provide bid bonds shows that there is fear of failure to deliver the goods if they are awarded the contract, says Sintayehu Demissie, lecturer at Addis Abeba University School of Business & Economics.