Procurement Act Amendment: NEFGAD Faults World Bank, Warns FG

The Network for the Actualization of Social Growth and Viable Development (NEFGAD), a public procurement advocacy group, has faulted a World Bank recommendation that the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) be stripped of its regulatory power to issue Certificates of No Objection to contracts.

NEFGAD in a 6-point position paper presented to the president and other relevant institutions on Tuesday and signed by its Head of Office, Mr Akingunola Omoniyi, warned the Federal government against bowing to external pressure capable of undermining and derailing the successes recorded by the public procurement Act implementation in the last 17 yeears.

NEFGAD in the position paper titled: ‘Harmonized National Procurement Stakeholders and Citizens’ Positions on draft public procurement bill 2023’ says a peer review and fitness test conducted on comments and recommendations, particularly from the World Bank against other country’s public procurement regulations across the globe suggests that they are “merely hypothetical without detail consideration of the country’s peculiar challenges and yearnings of the people, hence, the need to be mindful, in order not to allow the country to be used as testing ground for regulations capable of disrupting smooth operations of the country’s public procurement system’’.

The World Bank in one of its comments on the draft Public Procurement Bill 2023 termed issuance of Certificate of No Objection as operational and not regulatory, hence, it recommended it to be transferred to Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).

Akingunola says that the recommendation, if adopted by the federal government, will automatically revert the country to the Tenders’ Board / pre-procurement reform era where everything relating to contracts started and ended with the MDAs, saying it was the “inefficient and grossly ineffective practices of the Ministerial and extra-ministerial tenders’ board that informed the procurement reform in the first place.”

He said, ‘’Public Procurement is the lifewire of public governance and the main channel through which government serves the people, saying it constitutes over 99 percent of the entire governments spending, hence any framework around its operations must be guarded jealously and seek the input of the people it intends to serve.

‘’The World Bank’s position recommending the transfer of such an important mechanism to corruption-proliferate MDAs is not only discouraging but contradictory and suspicious, claiming the World Bank in its budget support and loan agreements has prior and post review mechanism of issuing No Objection certificate-based approvals to Nigeria as of today.”

He stated further that the appointment of the President or Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the economy as a member of the National Procurement Council, in addition to the President’s/Ministers’ enormous constitutional powers is enough to distract them from functioning effectively as head of the National Procurement Council.

He suggested that appointments into public procurement offices should be reserved strictly for core procurement professionals through competitive selections as currently outlined in the PPA, “not through the backdoor and or based on political patronage, as political interference has been the bane of the successful implementation of the PPA.”

NEFGAD frowned on a situation where the Federal Executive Council (FEC) sits to award contracts, adding that the country tends to benefit more by taking contract matters off the agenda of FEC.