A senior procurement professional has called on President John Dramani Mahama to withhold his assent to the Value for Money (VfM) Office Bill, 2026, warning that the legislation as passed risks piling fresh bureaucratic weight onto a procurement system that is already struggling to function efficiently.
Baffour Antoa Mensah, a senior procurement officer and Vice Chairman of the Ghana branch of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS), made the appeal on Saturday while speaking on Asaase Radio’s The Forum. He urged the president to invoke his constitutional powers to return the bill to Parliament for reconsideration, rather than sign it into law in its current form.
“I strongly want to call on the president to delay signing that bill. He knows what to do under the constitutional provision to return it back to Parliament, giving reasons,” he said, describing the legislation as a potential source of significant administrative complexity for state institutions.
The Value for Money Office Bill, 2026, passed by Parliament on Wednesday, March 25, provides for the establishment of an independent statutory body with authority to conduct value-for-money assessments, issue mandatory clearance for major contracts before award, monitor compliance, and enforce sanctions including administrative penalties, surcharges, prosecution referrals, and blacklisting of non-compliant contractors. Within its first five years, the office is projected to reduce contract inflation and waste by 10 to 15 percent, saving approximately GH¢3 billion annually.
Mensah acknowledged the intent behind the legislation but argued that its implementation would likely introduce an additional approval layer that could slow decision-making across ministries, departments, and agencies without tackling the underlying causes of procurement failure. His concern echoes that of management consultant and procurement specialist Kobina Ata-Bedu, who separately argued on Friday that existing legal frameworks, including the Public Procurement Act, already incorporate value-for-money principles and that the focus should be on enforcement rather than new legislation.
In Parliament, the Minority Caucus also distanced itself from the bill’s passage, with Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin arguing that the proposed office could become politically controlled and less effective at curbing corruption than the existing framework.
Beyond the VfM Bill, Mensah also weighed in on the ongoing controversy over the Big Push road contracts. While he accepted that sole sourcing was permissible under the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663) in narrowly defined circumstances, he called on The Fourth Estate to extend its investigation by filing a Right to Information (RTI) request directly with the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) to establish whether each sole-sourced contract was properly justified under Section 41 of the Act, which sets out the conditions under which non-competitive procurement methods can be approved.
He said obtaining those PPA records would provide the critical missing context needed to determine conclusively whether procurement rules were properly observed or systematically bypassed.
