How a Mauritian Public Body Buys a Complex System Under the Public Procurement Act

A public body in Mauritius that cannot fully specify what it is buying is not required to guess. Section 29 of the Public Procurement Act 2006, read on 13 September 2026, allows open advertised bidding to be held in two stages precisely where "it is not feasible to fully define the technical or contractual aspects of the procurement to elicit competitive bids". The provision has been on the statute book since the Act was proclaimed with effect from 17 January 2008. It is used far less often than the problem it solves occurs.

B Hub Consulting advises institutions on the specification and governance side of programmes like these, through our Infrastructure & Smart Delivery practice. We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice, we do not bid for the systems we help specify, and we hold no procurement licence because none exists. Where it is the wrong choice: if you need the bidding documents drafted as legal instruments, a challenge defended before the Independent Review Panel, or a statutory audit of a completed contract, those are mandates for counsel and for auditors, not for us.

The Act gives you eight methods, and the default is one of them

Section 15(1)(a) lists the methods available for goods, other services and works: open advertised bidding, restricted bidding, request for sealed quotations, direct procurement, community or end-user participation, departmental execution, competitive negotiations, and electronic reverse auction. The last two were added by Act No. 15 of 2021. For consultancy services, section 15(1)(b) gives a different list: request for proposals on the basis of quality and cost, quality alone, quality and fixed budget, or least cost and acceptable quality; direct procurement; or open advertised bidding.

Section 15(2)(a) then makes open advertised bidding the default for goods, other services and works, "to which equal access shall be provided to all eligible and qualified bidders without discrimination". Everything else is an exception that has to be justified. This matters for complex systems because the instinct, when a specification is hard to write, is to reach for a method that avoids writing one. The Act does not offer that. It offers a way to write the specification with the market instead.

What two-stage bidding actually requires you to do

Section 29 is short and prescriptive, and worth reading in full before a programme is scoped. In the first stage, section 29(2) requires the bidding documents to outline the purpose, the expected performance, the broad specifications of the equipment or works, and the qualifications required to perform the contract, and to call on bidders to submit technical bids without a bid price together with their comments on the proposed contract conditions.

In the first stage, the bidding documents shall outline the purpose; the expected performance; the broad specifications of the equipment or works to be procured; and the qualifications required to perform the contract; and call upon bidders to submit technical bids without a bid price and their comments on the proposed contract conditions.

Section 29(3) then permits the public body to discuss a technical bid with any bidder, to understand it or to indicate changes required to make it acceptable. Section 29(4) allows the body either to reject bids that cannot be brought up to the basic requirements, or to modify the technical specifications, the evaluation criteria and the contract conditions "in order to maximise competition". Section 29(5) closes the loop: bidders not rejected are invited to submit final priced bids against the revised documents.

Read that sequence as a design instruction rather than a procedure. The first stage is where the institution learns what the market can actually build, and the price of that learning is that you must publish broad specifications and expected performance before you know the answer. Institutions that struggle with two-stage bidding usually struggle at exactly that point: writing expected performance without writing a solution.

Competitive negotiations are not the complexity route

Section 25B is frequently misread as a general-purpose escape from open bidding. It is not. The grounds are closed and specific: urgency where the circumstances "were not foreseeable by the public body or was not the result of any dilatory conduct on the part of the public body"; a catastrophe; all bids received being classed as irregular or unacceptable; protection of the essential security interests of Mauritius; or as a complementary procedure where there is a tie in lowest evaluated price or in combined score points, or where the lowest evaluated price substantially exceeds the estimated cost.

Complexity appears nowhere on that list. A programme that is hard to specify is a section 29 case. A programme that became urgent because the institution took two years to decide is expressly excluded by the dilatory conduct wording in section 25B(1)(a). The distinction is worth labouring because the two routes have very different audit trails, and the one chosen on the day is the one a reviewer will test afterwards.

The rule that catches complex programmes: section 49

Section 49 is one sentence: "No public body may artificially divide the modalities of procurement in such a way as to avoid any monetary thresholds laid down in this Act or in an instrument drawn up pursuant to this Act."

Complex systems attract this problem honestly rather than dishonestly. A command and control programme, an enforcement system or a national platform decomposes naturally into a network layer, a hardware layer, an application layer and a support contract. Packaging them separately can be entirely legitimate, and can also be the thing that keeps each package below the threshold that would send it to the Central Procurement Board. The test a reviewer applies is not whether the packages are technically separable but whether the division was artificial and whether its effect was to avoid a threshold.

The defensible position is established before the packaging decision, not after it. Record why the programme is divided the way it is, in terms of delivery risk or market structure, and record it at the point the decision is taken. Section 50(2)(a) already requires every public body to engage in procurement planning "with a view to achieving maximum value for public expenditure", and section 50(2)(b) requires an annual plan and planning of each step for major contracts. That planning record is where the answer to a section 49 question lives.

The challenge clock starts before the contract, not after

Section 43(1) gives a bidder who claims to have suffered or to be likely to suffer loss or injury from a breach of duty the right to challenge the proceedings "before the entry into force of the procurement contract". Section 43(2) requires the challenge in writing to the Chief Executive Officer of the public body, identifying the specific act or omission. Section 43(4) is the operative one for a programme schedule: unless the challenge is resolved, the Chief Executive Officer "shall suspend the public procurement proceedings" and issue a written, reasoned decision within the prescribed time, indicating corrective measures if the challenge is upheld.

Above that sits the Independent Review Panel, constituted under section 44 with a Chairperson, a Vice-chairperson and four other members appointed by the President acting on the advice of the Prime Minister after consultation with the Leader of the Opposition, drawn from legal, administrative, economic, financial, engineering, scientific or technical backgrounds. A programme plan that has no suspension contingency in it is a plan that assumes no bidder will ever challenge.

A test to run before the bidding documents are drafted

1. 01Write the expected performance in one page, without naming a technology. If you cannot, you are in section 29(1)(a) territory and the first stage is where that page gets written with the market.
2. 02Count the technical solutions that could meet it. If there is genuinely one, single-stage bidding is honest. If there are three and you do not know which is right, section 29(1)(b) is the provision written for you.
3. 03Ask why the programme is packaged the way it is, and write the answer down. If the honest answer includes a threshold, stop. That is section 49.
4. 04Check whether the urgency is yours or the world’s. Section 25B(1)(a) excludes urgency caused by the public body’s own dilatory conduct, so a delayed decision does not convert into a negotiation ground.
5. 05Put a suspension window in the schedule. Section 43(4) requires proceedings to be suspended while an unresolved challenge is decided. A programme with a fixed political date and no contingency has already absorbed that risk without pricing it.

For the wider question of which kind of firm to engage on the island, read the best consultants in Mauritius compared, and for the distinction that trips up most first-time buyers, consulting firms against corporate services providers. Our practice areas set out what we take on, our engagements describe the mandates in anonymised form, and you are welcome to put a specification question to us.