The Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has proffered ways to stop the abuse of public procurement and ensure integrity in expenditure for national development.
Olaopa spoke at a webinar of the Procurement Professionals Association of Nigeria (PPAN) held on Saturday.
Olaopa spoke on the topic “Enthroning Integrity in Public Expenditure: A Procurement Question”. According to him, public procurement is not merely a purchasing and supply function, it is an implementation instrument not only for budget execution, but a veritable economic growth instrument in achieving the ‘Nigeria First’ local content and made-in-Nigeria national economic diversification strategy.
To him, budget performance and credibility especially depend on the effectiveness and efficiency at which the procurement process converts Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs)’ resource allocations, programmes and projects into functioning roads, medicines and drug in hospitals, classrooms, security assets, digital systems, and social services, and at acceptable quality.
But he decried a situation where procurement has turned into a high-risk domain for corruption, collusion, and mismanagement
Thus, for him, there is the need to get the best from public procurement. He said that this could be achieved by the professionalisation of the procurement cadre and supportive capacity development programmes culminating in SPESSE (the Sustainable Procurement, Environmental and Social Standard Enhancement) programme
“Cadre professionalisation and SPESSE are defining strength, enabler, and investment enrichment leverages and opportunity to keep building procurement professionalism, competence, certification, and irreducible standards of professional practices in the procurement cadre.SPESSE is such a veritable benchmark programme designed to build sustainable capacity across procurement and related standards, including centres of excellence and scaled certification targets that must therefore be seen to be optimised”, he said.
He also highlighted the need to implement significant culture change, entailing “narrative shift” in procurement reform from viewing contracts as patronage – a tool for personal gain, nepotism, or political favour – to viewing them as instrument of public value.
“This transition will not be merely procedural. It will require transforming organisational and behavioural mindsets of procurement players from ‘business as usual’ to incentive and merit-based commitment to transforming procurement departments into integrity systems.
Such a system works with instruments designed to shift procurement from a focus solely on the lowest price to achieving best value for money, with strong concession for quality and performance over the contract life cycle.
Such integrity entities work based on criteria and metrics that have structurally moved from the arbitrary award of contracts to a merit-based system that uses specialist procurement officials, standard practices, and transparent audit trails.
Such a department has indeed adopted e-procurement systems in a measure that technically reduced human interaction and increased index-based accountability”, he added.
He urged the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) and others to track performance progress as a basis to report on trends, opportunities and progress and then build on such gains by strengthening in-built independent verifications and transparency methodologies enforced in the procurement process.
He said that the BPP should upgrade to become what he identified as a “system architect” and not merely a “gatekeeper”.
“As it stands, BPP’s most enduring value lies in the capacity to set standard, aggregate evidence of infractions or professionalism and their review as a basis for action, targeting behaviour modification and driving consequence management.BPP therefore needs upgrade from merely discharging its traditional role of merely reviewing finished plans, to guiding agencies along trajectories of continuous learning and incremental improvement – driving national economic diversification goals through enforcement of ‘Nigeria First’national economic diversification goals; driving digital transformation of procurement processes;
focusing more on proactive procurement planning to prevent corrupt practices, rather than just detecting it; strengthening of existing price intelligence system to combat over-invoicing and ensure value for money; implementing process reviews and modelling to reduce procurement process cycle-time from months to a few weeks; building a comprehensive digitised database for contractors, consultants, and procurement officers, and I can go on and on”, he said.
Olaopa also urged the prevention of cartels by monitoring price patterns and rotating frameworks where appropriate and that quality assurance should be enforced.
However , noting that
Nigeria’s procurement reform story since 2007 was not that of failure but that of foundations laid and gains achieved, he said that the Renewed Hope Agenda could deepen these reforms by shifting procurement from process compliance to integrity-driven delivery, where every naira is traceable from budget to contract performance and public value.
