Government departments and ministers in Uganda are in disagreement over the bidding process for the 660MW Karuma power station, a development that could impact on the delivery timelines of the project.

While some officials are for the re-tendering of the power station contract, which entails a repeat of the whole procurement process, others feel they should go ahead to pick the China International Water Electricity (CWE) company, which scored 82.99 in the technical evaluation, and was flagged off to go to the financial evaluation stage — but the award should be made with conditions, a senior government official said.

This is not the first battle around the project; while some officials supported Western donors’ offer to provide free advisory services on the Karuma project, others decided that they should be locked out completely to avoid “environmental and financial noise” of the sort that frustrated the 250MW Bujagali hydropower station project.

READ: Karuma tender board probed over $1.2m ‘bribe’

However, when The EastAfrican spoke to State Minister for Energy Simon D’ujanga, who led a team to China to do a due diligence exercise, said that the decision lies with the Ministry of Energy contracts committee, which has already received three reports.

“The evaluation is ongoing; we have handed over three reports — the due diligence, the police investigation and evaluation committee reports — and we are waiting for them to make a decision,” said Mr D’ujanga.

He refused to speculate about when the process will end but ruled out the procurement process being repeated.

Senior officials in the Ministry of Energy have said Uganda can fall back on the guarantor, which has to give them assurances if the contractor fails to perform to the expected standards. “Otherwise, no bidder can be disqualified, because of the legal implications.”

One of the new conditions is that all the bidders have to have a guarantor, which for the Karuma power station would not be the World Bank on behalf of the government of Uganda as is usually the case.

In this case, for a company like CWE, the China Three Gorges Corporation, its parent company, has to be the guarantor.

Officials from departments that want a repeat of the whole process say there is a general frustration with the way China engages with Africa.

They said Chinese government officials “interfere” on behalf of particular companies, and unfortunately some Uganda government officials take bribes without putting the interests of the country first, said an official who did not want to be named.

More and more Chinese companies are now interested in investing in big infrastructure projects in Africa.

One of the Chinese projects cited is Huawei, a Chinese IT firm, which was contracted by the Uganda government five years ago to lay a fibre-optic cable in a $106 million national data transmission and e-government infrastructure project.

However, the work done by Huawei was found to be substandard, prompting a forensic technical audit in 2010 that found that the cable depth was too shallow at 0.9m instead of 1.2m, exposing it to vandalism and accidental damage by road contractors; it also found the cable had no thunder lines and some of it was suspended through septic tanks without protection.

The audit also found that the cable posed cyber security issues, as almost none of the routers had console password protection, meaning anyone could login into the router and access information.

“Huawei acknowledged these mishaps and committed to fixing them at its own cost,” said Edward Baliddawa, a member of the Parliamentary ICT Committee.

Sources said without China ‘interference’ they would have preferred FiberHome Technologies Group, an integrated solutions provider in China. FiberHome actually supplied all the materials used in the Uganda project.

“Whatever we say or do, let us remember what happened to Bujagali — it cost this country $1 billion and a lot of time was wasted,” said Paul Mubiru, the Director Energy at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development.

The Bujagali power station only last week achieved its full capacity of 250MW, which were added to the national grid.

Average demand now stands at about 450 MW at peak time against a total average available supply of about 610MW, at optimum operation, after the full commissioning of Bujagali. The total installed power capacity is now over 1,000 MW, up from 820MW.

Ministry of Energy officials say the total available capacity now meets demand, with a surplus this year as Bujagali comes on board.

The National Planning Authority recommends that Uganda should increase its power generation capacity to 3,500 MW by 2015 because more energy is required to meet the ever-growing demand from a steadily rising population.

Construction at Karuma was initially expected to commence in July this year, involving a complex hydropower plant with a 660 MW underground power station housing five turbines, located 3 km upstream of Karuma Bridge and 80 km downstream of Lake Kyoga on the River Nile.