NOTE (10 Sept. 2013): Responding to this blog post written yesterday (below), Mr. Willard Mwemba contacted me and kindly clarified that (1) the CCC had not yet appointed or otherwise selected a consultant and (2) the review process is centered on the COMESA competition Regulations and not the Guidelines.

According to an article that appeared on 6 September 2013 in BusinessDay/BDLive, the head of COMESA CCC‘s merger unit Willard Mwemba has revealed that the CCC has supposedly already chosen the consultancy tasked with aiding the agency in revamping its competition regulations.

The article states: “He said they have already appointed a consultant to address the critical questions.”  The remarks were reportedly made at this year’s seventh annual conference on competition law, economics and policy hosted by the South African Competition Commission in Johannesburg.

If true — i.e., if the CCC has indeed already selected a team of consultants to support its (commendable) effort to review and evaluate its own competition-related Regulations — this would directly contravene the stated deadline of 30 September 2013 for submission of bids (para. 10.9 in the RFP) for said tender (RFP No. CCC/30-08-2013/1).  See our prior reporting here.

It remains to be seen whether this is the case, or whether the task of “address[ing] the critical questions” mentioned by Mr. Mwemba is in fact a distinct project from the one that is the subject of the formal Request for Proposal issued by the CCC.  (Note: This is now clarified, as per the headline above, as Mr. Mwemba has explained that the BDLive article misquoted his statement.)