GOV’T TO DELIVER CHOBE-PALAPYE WATER PIPELINE VIA PPP
After spending billions of pula on delivering major water infrastructure in recent years, government says while eager to deliver the 661km ChobePalapye water pipeline in the near future, it decided to deliver the project without parting with a single thebe.
It preferred rather to deliver it through a public private partnership (PPP), which will see the winning contractor, investing its own billions into the project and supplying the water to government at agreed prices.
Speaking to The Monitor at her office in the Ministry of Land Management, Water and Sanitation Services permanent secretary (PS) Bonolo Khumotaka said along with the ChobePalapye water pipeline, the Glen Valley water reclamation project, which will essentially reclaim the affluent water for human consumption, will also be delivered via the PPP model.
The PS says the expected high costs of procuring the two projects informed government to adopt an alternative model of PPP where the winning bidder will have to fund the project from its own pockets, adding that when the time to procure the contractor comes, the usual open competitive bidding process will be followed.
“We are not yet at a bid awarding stage, we still have many stages before procurement. We are still at planning stage; in as far as the Chobe-Palapye project is concerned.
Therefore, we do not have the timelines for the delivery of the project yet; we’ll would know after the planning stage,” she explained.
She said that some of the many stages to go through include setting the terms of references for a transactional advisor for the project.
“After setting the terms for the transactional advisory services, we will invite tenders for the transactional advisory services for the project; the transactional advisory will inform us on the complexity of the project, especially the cost aspect of it, which currently we do not know; which models of the PPP to consider, like, will it be the design, build, and maintain; if so, how many years will the contractor be managing and maintaining the project; it also involves things like agreement on risks; that is; will government have to inject any moneys? The transactional advisor aspect of it alone can take us 12 months or more, before we get into procurement,” explained Khumothaka.
The PS however said they have just recently completed the transactional advisory for the Glen Valley water reclamation project, and that it is already at procurement stage.
According to Khumothaka, while government doesn’t have the specific details about the costs of the ChobePalapye water pipeline, previously completed projects like the North-South Water Carrier, which cost billions of pula indicate that delivering water over a dedicated pipeline of over 600km from Chobe River to Moralane in Palapye will be quite costly; it will require pipes of much bigger diameter, as well as other complex infrastructure like pump stations, treatment plants, reservoirs, telemetry, fibre networks, to name a few, so even though we may not have the exact projected costs, current and past bulk water projects inform us that it will be costly, but we need it delivered, hence the decision to deliver it by PPP model, if we can be successful.