By Eng. L Zulu (Associate)
When a national hospital undergoes rehabilitation, the margin for error narrows considerably. Tender evaluators assess far more than price and programme schedules. They require tangible proof that contractors can deliver on their commitments: evidence of qualified personnel, documented planning for worker welfare and statutory costs, and credible plans for rapid, safe mobilisation once the award letter arrives.
For the Kabwe Central Hospital tender this autumn, Daka & Associates is working directly with bidding contractors to eliminate these uncertainties while protecting them from the financial and legal risks of pre-hiring staff they may never deploy. This is an ongoing case, and the approach we are implementing is already reshaping how contractors prepare their submissions.
1. The Ground Reality
We participated in the official site visit and surveyed the rehabilitation scope across multiple critical areas: Administration, Pharmacy, Outpatient Department, high-cost clinics, Intensive Care Unit, operating theatres, mortuaries, radiography, dental facilities, and numerous wards. Through this process, we identified more than thirty contractors actively preparing bids for the Kabwe package. Most are intensely focused on delivering compliant technical and commercial submissions before the deadline.
The tender documents create specific obligations. Section 3 explicitly requires demonstrable key personnel, while Clauses 5.12 and 5.13 of the BoQ mandate clear provision for workforce welfare and labour burden costs. Evaluators will expect verifiable evidence, not aspirational promises. These requirements expose a familiar vulnerability in the bidding process: contractors often submit speculative or duplicated personnel lists to satisfy bid forms, creating what the industry informally calls “ghost crews.” When evaluators discover duplicate names across competing bids, or when document verification reveals forged credentials, the consequences range from bid rejection to lasting reputational damage.
2. A Practical Solution Built for Tender Compliance
Our service addresses this challenge through a structured, audit-ready approach. We provide verified personnel packages that meet the PER-1 and PER-2 form requirements, complete with authenticated CVs, trade certificates, and signed candidate consent documents that allow evaluators to conduct independent verification. Each contractor receives a BOQ-mapped crew roster, precisely matching required roles and quantities to the Kabwe bill of quantities. This roster includes PPE and tool specifications, along with the detailed labour burden calculations necessary to price Clause 5.13 accurately, covering NAPSA contributions, NHIMA, and leave provisions.
Every participating contractor receives a Match Certificate and Priority Token, which serves as documented evidence in their bid submission that they have established a mobilisation-ready workforce on standby.
To ensure crews understand the unique demands of working within operating hospital environments, we conduct a three-part Construction Preparedness Webinar scheduled for 23–25 October 2025, where experienced professionals share practical lessons drawn from similar projects. Finally, we maintain active waitlist and replacement management systems, ensuring rapid access to verified alternative candidates if any matched personnel become unavailable before contract award.
The fundamental outcome is straightforward: contractors submit bids supported by credible, auditable mobilisation evidence without committing to employment relationships until they actually win the contract.
3. How Contractors Engage With This Approach
We have designed the participation process to integrate seamlessly with existing tender preparation workflows. Contractors are not asked to pause their technical preparations or to make premature hiring commitments. Instead, they enroll by identifying the role capacities they anticipate needing, specifying positions such as masons, electricians, and foremen. We then conduct comprehensive vetting of candidates from the local labour force, including document verification, trade certificate authentication, and signed consent collection. From this process, we produce verified personnel packages and deliver a unique roster to each enrolling contractor. We issue the Match Certificate and conduct the preparedness webinar to train the matched crew. Should the contractor win the tender, the matched personnel have first right of refusal to join the project, subject to standard final verification procedures.
This structure eliminates the twin risks that contractors face at bid stage. The first is the compliance risk of submitting forged or duplicated credentials that could result in disqualification. The second is the hidden operational cost and time burden of recruiting and mobilising a workforce after receiving the award, when project timelines are already pressing.
4. A Contractor’s Perspective
The practical concern we hear repeatedly from Quantity Surveyors, Bid-Preparation teams and site engineers is both simple and profound: it makes no commercial sense to recruit personnel before winning a contract, given the immediate cost exposure and potential legal obligations, yet winning the contract immediately triggers an urgent need to hire and mobilise, creating delays and unexpected expenses that erode margins and compromise start dates.
Our response is to absorb that pre-award recruitment risk entirely. We recruit, vet, and prepare the workforce during the tender period while contractors maintain complete flexibility. If they win, their verified personnel are immediately available, already trained through our webinar programme and fully documented for evaluator scrutiny. The contractor avoids recruitment costs and eliminates mobilisation delays that would otherwise push back their critical path.
5. Current Progress and Confidentiality
We are currently operating this service for multiple bidders on the Kabwe tender. Three contractors have enrolled in the matching and vetting programme, though we maintain strict confidentiality regarding participant identities to preserve competitive integrity. These contractors have purchased Right-of-First-Refusal access to our validated local workforce pool, ensuring that mobilisation will be genuinely local and operationally rapid.
6. Risk Reduction in Clear Terms
The service delivers measurable risk reduction across several dimensions:
- Each matched personnel list is unique to the enrolling contractor for this tender cycle, eliminating any possibility of duplicate crew submissions across competing bids.
- The audit trail we create through signed consent documents, verified certificates, and webinar attendance records makes contractor documentation defensible under scrutiny.
- Our provision of accurate labour burden inputs, including all statutory contributions and leave calculations, ensures that bid pricing reflects genuine mobilisation costs rather than underestimated projections.
- Finally, winning contractors can transition directly from contract award to active site operations with trained, HSE-inducted crews, compressing what is typically a weeks-long recruitment and induction process into a matter of days.
7. Expected Practical Outcomes
We anticipate several concrete improvements to the procurement process. Evaluators should encounter fewer speculative personnel lists and observe more verifiable, evidence-based mobilisation plans. Contractors who invest in preparation will achieve materially shorter lead times between contract award and operational readiness. Most importantly, projects should commence with enhanced safety profiles, as HSE induction and hospital-specific briefings reduce early incidents and rework in particularly sensitive spaces such as operating theatres and intensive care units.
8. Next Steps for Bidders
If you are currently preparing a bid for Kabwe Central Hospital and wish to remove the ghost-crew compliance risk from your submission, the enrollment process is straightforward. Reply with the word ENROLL to our email to receive the Contractor Consent document and invoice. We offer three service tiers: Basic, Advanced, and Premium packages scaled to different project approaches. Provide your anticipated role capacities using a simple one-page Excel template we supply. We will then deliver your personnel pack, unique roster, and Match Certificate within the agreed delivery timeframe and schedule your matched crew for the 23–25 October webinar sessions.
9. Final Observations
Tenders are ultimately awarded based on an integrated assessment of price competitiveness, programme realism, and institutional credibility. For complex rehabilitation works within operating hospital environments, credibility demonstrated through defensible mobilisation planning. This is the operational gap we close for Kabwe bidders: we provide practical, auditable readiness that reduces procurement risk for evaluators and accelerates delivery capability for contractors when the award letter arrives.
