wp-signups.php Public Procurement Archives - Centre for Social Justice https://csj-ng.org/tag/public-procurement/ mainstreaming social justice in public life Tue, 01 Mar 2022 14:54:16 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://csj-ng.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cropped-CSJ-Favicon-1-32x32.png Public Procurement Archives - Centre for Social Justice https://csj-ng.org/tag/public-procurement/ 32 32 CSJ Scores High On Implementation Of State2State Project https://csj-ng.org/csj-scores-high-on-implementation-of-state2state-project/ https://csj-ng.org/csj-scores-high-on-implementation-of-state2state-project/#respond Tue, 18 Jan 2022 01:29:20 +0000 https://csj-ng.org/?p=223679 The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) scored high on assessment in the implementation of the State2State project last year.

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]]> The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) scored high on assessment in the implementation of the State2State project last year.

State2State, a USAID funded project was aimed at strengthening subnational governance systems in six Nigerian states of Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Ebonyi, Gombe and Sokoto states.

It was designed to also oversee service delivery in the health, education, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sectors. Through State2State, CSJ was able to build the capacity of Civil Society Organisations to increase accountability, transparency, and effectiveness in governance.

First, CSJ conducted a rapid assessment survey of 240 Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in the six states of the federation which informed the training curriculum and facilitation of capacity building workshops as well as mentoring activities for CSOs in the project implementation states.

In Ebonyi State, CSJ conducted a capacity building training for more than forty civil society organisations (CSOs) on best practises in public sector procurement.

A similar training was organised in Adamawa State where participants were told that governments all over the world use public procurement policy and implementation mechanisms to address a number of issues including budget implementation, service delivery, social, economic, environmental, human rights and developmental concerns.

CSOs in Akwa Ibom State called on the state government to ensure that members appointed into the state’s council on Public Procurement are consensus representatives of the group. 

In Bauchi, the Citizen Engagement Director and Advisory Team Lead for the USAID- State2State project, Ahmed Mohammed charged civil servants to work in collaboration with CSOs as partners to reform public procurement.

Mohammed Bello, the Team Lead, State2State in Gombe State encouraged participants at the workshop to follow up on the practical lessons taught at the meeting to scale up transparency and accountability in the state’s public finance management.

While at Sokoto, CSJ urged civil society partners to ensure that the state’s budget becomes gender responsive to engender inclusion in public expenditures.

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]]> https://csj-ng.org/csj-scores-high-on-implementation-of-state2state-project/feed/ 0 223679 CSJ criticizes the amendment of 12 Fundamental Economic Acts with just one Bill(Finance Bill 2020) https://csj-ng.org/csj-criticizes-the-amendment-of-12-fundamental-economic-acts-with-just-one-billfinance-bill-2020/ https://csj-ng.org/csj-criticizes-the-amendment-of-12-fundamental-economic-acts-with-just-one-billfinance-bill-2020/#respond Tue, 22 Dec 2020 07:20:38 +0000 https://csj-ng.org/?p=222771 News CSJ criticizes the amendment of 12 Fundamental Economic Acts with just one Bill Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on whatsapp Share on telegram The lead director of the Centre for Social Justice, Eze Onyekpere on the Tuesday 15th December 2020, along side other CSJ staff addressed the media on the NGO’s stand...

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CSJ criticizes the amendment of 12 Fundamental Economic Acts with just one Bill

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Finance bill Memorandum by CSJ

The lead director of the Centre for Social Justice, Eze Onyekpere on the Tuesday 15th December 2020, along side other CSJ staff addressed the media on the NGO’s stand on the 2020 finance bill, which was passed by the senate on the 15th of December 2020. The Lead Director in his statement, condemned the move by the National Assembly, describing it as an ambitious attempt to amend 12 Acts with just one bill. The 12 Acts include Capital Gains Act, Companies Income Tax Act, Personal Income Tax Act, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (Establishment) Act, Customs and Excise Tariff, etc. (Consolidated) Act, Value Added Tax Act, Federal Inland Revenue Service (Establishment) Act, Nigeria Export Processing Zone Act, Oil and Gas Export Free Zone Act, Fiscal Responsibility Act, Companies and Allied matters Act and the Public Procurement Act.

The lead director said “It is simply too ambitious to propose to amend 12 Acts of the National Assembly (NASS) with just one Act of 39 pages. The competencies and expertise required to attend to the subjects covered by these laws are too wide to be considered in just one amendment Bill. Furthermore, these laws are too fundamental to our economic management to contemplate amending them in a hurry. They require due contemplation and deep consultation with stakeholders. Their presentation and consideration as single bills should be considered on their merits. Lumping them together serves no useful purpose.”

The Lead Director then went further to advice the other arm of the National Assembly yet to pass the bill to seek the right competences when considering the bill, given its broad scope. Although it took the Senate about 2 weeks to complete the entire process, Mr. Eze advised the other arm of the National Assembly to spend more time on the bill so as to enable them consider all angles, to avoid creating problems for the future.

Mr. Eze went further to criticize some parts of the bill. One of such parts is the increase in the mobilization fee for contracts to thirty percent (30%). He described this move as opening doors for unfinished contracts to thrive since most contracts have a profit margin of less than 30%. He said this move will encourage contractors to abandon projects at very early stages.

The Lead Director discussed the proposed amendment to the procurement Act. The proposed amendment seeks to create second level approving authorities: The Federal Executive Council for the Executive; the National Assembly Tender’s Board for the Legislature; and the National Judicial Council Tender’s Board for the Judiciary. He said that there is only one government, one treasury/ministry of finance, and that procurement need not reflect the three arms of government. Eze Onyekpere also said that the proposed bill runs contrary to best practices. Nigeria’s Country Procurement Assessment Report June 2000 had warned against this. The Report had recommended as follows:

“Once a law on public procurement has been enacted and regulations, manuals and standard bidding documents issued, carrying out public procurement including contract awards will clearly be an administrative function, the mechanics of which should be disengaged from the executive. Currently, high level politicians such as Governors, Ministers and Commissioners are operationally involved in the procurement process. However, under the reformed procurement system, high level politicians should maintain their overall managerial oversight responsibilities while leaving administrative and operational matters (including procurement) to the civil servants.”

When this recommendation is juxtaposed with the intended amendment, it becomes quite easy to assert that this amendment is not in line with best practices. The implication of continuing on this new path may lead to a situation where the President of the Federal Republic or the Chief Justice of Nigeria will be cited for procurement fraud. Furthermore, the proposed amendment still makes reference to a Council everyone knows does not exist.

Finally, the Lead Director then said a more concise document detailing the recommendations CSJ is proposing will be submitted to the House of Representatives to enable them consider the bill from a different light.

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]]> https://csj-ng.org/csj-criticizes-the-amendment-of-12-fundamental-economic-acts-with-just-one-billfinance-bill-2020/feed/ 0 222771 The NDDC Cesspool https://csj-ng.org/the-nddc-cesspool/ https://csj-ng.org/the-nddc-cesspool/#respond Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:43:17 +0000 http://csj-ng.org/?p=216148 The current mind-boggling revelations in the ongoing legislative probe of the Niger Delta Development Commission throws a direct challenge to President Muhammadu Buhari’s promise to fight corruption. Will the administration live up to expectation in the fight against corruption by taking drastic but lawful steps against the perpetrators of the heist? This discourse reviews the...

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The current mind-boggling revelations in the ongoing legislative probe of the Niger Delta Development Commission throws a direct challenge to President Muhammadu Buhari’s promise to fight corruption. Will the administration live up to expectation in the fight against corruption by taking drastic but lawful steps against the perpetrators of the heist? This discourse reviews the key issues arising from the looting of public resources in the NDDC.

Running a government is serious business which should be based on law, policies and ethics. It demands a certain level of consistency in terms of application and implementation of laws. It is about securing life, property and the public welfare. Governance demands a certain measure of competence, skills, fellow feeling and compassion as well as ability consistency between statements and action. There should be resonance between the anti-corruption mantra and the practice in real life. The federal government claims to be fighting corruption but the more the official noise about the struggle, the more corruption intensifies. This can be traced to lack of consistency in policy and law application and the lack of principles among principal members of the federal administration.

The most recent issue is about the management of the resources of the NDDC. From the establishment of the Commission during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency to date, the NDDC has been a cesspool of corruption where public officers get away with fiscal murder and corruption. All the details of the illegal and inappropriate expenditure coming out of the probes in the National Assembly only reveal one thing; that impunity for mismanagement of public resources reigns writ large and virtually no one has been held accountable for it in the past. And the way the whole episode has been reduced to a joke and charade between the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godswill Akpabio and the former managing director of the NDDC further ridicules the anti-corruption campaign.

From the beginning, NDDC has never published its draft budgets in hard or soft copy or even uploaded the draft to its website. The consideration of the budget estimates in the National Assembly is a closed shop with citizens unable to participate or even know the details of the process. After the budget has been approved, neither NDDC, the National Assembly nor the Budget Office of the Federation publishes the details of the NDDC budget. All we see is a single line item of a lump sum of money included in the statutory transfers. Why would NDDC hide its budget from the public especially the people of the Niger Delta who are the beneficiaries of its activities? It seems that most of the projects in the budget are duplicated when they are pitched with the budgets of states and local governments in the region or even the projects of the Ministry of Niger Della. The Ministry is notorious for proposing and getting legislative approval for projects without a geographical site and with extremely nebulous descriptions which makes them amenable to monitoring only by the proposers of the projects.

It seems that part of the excuse for not publishing the NDDC budget is that under an unwritten policy position which is not motivated by the public good, the Budget Office of the Federation, the Ministry of Finance and the benefiting agencies have consistently failed, refused and neglected to publish the details of statutory transfers. From the votes going to the National Judicial Council, Universal Basic Education Commission, Independent National Electoral Commission, National Human Rights Commission, National Assembly, etc. the details of the votes are hidden from the public. It is worth reiterating that there is no legal basis supporting this opaque practice. Rather, the Center for Social Justice, a Nigerian knowledge Institution had litigated this issue and the Federal High Court had declared this practice illegal. But the fiscal powers insist on continuing the illegality.

For procurement of goods and services, the emerging and established evidence is that NDDC ignores and treats the Public Procurement Act of 2007 with great contempt. There is even no pretence about following due process and preparing documentation which tries to cover misdeeds. Simply put, there are no approved procurement plans, projects are not advertised for bidders to take part in government commerce; evaluation and selection of winners is not based on the competence of the bidders and how responsive their bid is to the solicitation. It is simply a brazen act of looting which cannot be hidden. Furthermore, NDDC neither prepares nor publishes quarterly, half yearly or yearly budget implementation reports. Thus, in the whole budget preparation, approval and implementation exercise, the citizen who is the owner of the resources is shut out. So, why should any reasonable person be surprised about current revelations?

In all of these, there is and there had been National Assembly committees exercising oversight over the allocation and management of public resources available to the NDDC for the public good. Pray, what is the definition of oversight? Is oversight done in the public interest for which the legislators are elected and handsomely paid? Has oversight been done in the private interest of the legislators? It appears that oversight over the years became coterminous with discovering fraud and corruption and instead of ensuring that the culprits are brought to book and the treasury recovers the money, the oversight committee simply asks for a part of the loot and covers it up thereby compounding the felony.

Did the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission and the financial intelligence agency go to sleep over this heist that has endured in the NDDC? All the billions going into private pockets for services not rendered or going into the pockets of public officers should have set up a red flag, which if duly followed would have discovered the extent of the mismanagement. The law allows the Auditor-General for the Federation to look into the financial accounts and audits of agencies such as NDDC. How did this escape the censure of the Auditor-General in terms of comments on their reports?

In moving forward, part of the reforms in the NDDC should include a reform of its budget and procurement process. The draft budget should be available in the public domain and the legislative approval should be open, advertised and Nigerians allowed to be part of the process. This will restrain wholesale corruption in the packaging of the budget. The NDDC must publish quarterly, half yearly and full year budget implementation reports. The procurement process must follow the Public Procurement Act to the letter in terms of procurement planning, bid solicitation, bid opening, evaluation and selection of winners. Utmost transparency must be introduced into the procurement process because this is where the looting takes place.

Nigerians must not drop the ball in demanding for heads to roll, thieves sent to jail and looted money recovered. The romance, sexual indecency and salacious angle introduced between Akpabio and the former managing director of NDDC is a needless distraction. We must focus on the real issues. For the forensic audit to be successful, all persons including the Minister of Niger Delta who have been implicated in one way or the other must step aside either voluntarily or be asked to do so and an independent team of auditors recruited to do the job.

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