Purple stamps

Alex October 20th, 2008

After a frustrating week, I finally now have my contract signed and stamped – unfortunately it took several visits (on different days) to the main Uni campus, about 7km away on the other side of town, to get it sorted, but at least the finance dept now seem happy to pay me at the end of the month. Virtually every document here, if it’s to be regarded as official or valid in any way, must be accompanied not only by a signature, but also a purple stamp. Good to have my contract signed and stamped, but the hassle involved wasn’t aided by me having a bit of a stomach bug most of the week, which made me feel pretty rough.

So the weekend (and by then feeling better) was quite a relief. Andy came over from Abi Adi on Fri afternoon as his college are looking to buy some computers and other equipment. The process of purchasing can be painfully slow, as it’s tightly regulated in the name of beating corruption. First of all you need to get at least 3 quotes for the equipment you want, the supplier then gives their quote in a sealed envelope. The quotes are then opened all together by the procurement committee and the cheapest quote is given the contract, different parts of the order might be from different suppliers, which is fine, but then it starts to get complicated. On the purchase order, you need to specify the exact model of (say) DVD drive you want. The supplier may then only be able to supply a slightly different model. Then begins lots of to-ing and fro-ing between the the requestor of the equipment, the supplier and the procurement committee, as the committee won’t always know the differences between models of computer equipment. As an example, the server for our project took over a year to be purchased.

Andy and his colleagues visited the same 12 shops 3 times each over the course of the weekend, and now has 8 quotes to take back and review. Why did they visit each shop 3 times? Well, the first time was to give each shop a list of the items they were looking to purchase. The second was to give each shop the same list, but this time with the official purple stamp. The final visit was to collect the quotes. So why couldn’t the first and second visits have been combined? We have absolutely no idea!

  • Posted in: VSO
  • 182 views

Comments are closed.