A long list of expectations has been drawn for President Muhammadu Buhari’s long-awaited second-term ministers who will take oath of office this week after a two-day orientation retreat starting today.
The retreat will usher the ministers into the myriad of challenges facing the country, which they will be expected to tackle in the next four years.
Top among the list for the new cabinet members include, amongst others, Nigeria’s rising debt pile, now at N24.3 trillion, equivalent to 20 percent of GDP.
The ministers are also expected to find ways of reducing executive/legislature bickering in budgeting that had often led to delays in budget passage and achievement of the much-talked-about January to December budget cycle.
The revelations that over 20,000 projects have been abandoned since 1999 should also provide reasons for worry, even though President Buhari has assured that he would revisit all abandoned projects.
Auwal Ibrahim, executive director, Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), has particularly tasked the ministers to come up with more refined and sustainable methods of dealing with corruption.
Ibrahim urged the incoming ministers to drop the current “reactionary” approach and adopt the more sustainable “proactive” approach to issues to make it difficult for heads of MDAs to loot public funds.
He advised President Buhari to place each minister in their places where their potentials will be maximised, adding that the only way to guarantee the ministers’ maximum performance would be to place them in their “arenas of strength”.
“The best way to fight corruption is to use technology to enhance proper monitoring of public expenditures. They also need to evolve sound policies that will strengthen the social security system to guarantee good living standards even after retirement. Thirdly, government must rejig the budget system to ensure maximum benefits through a more efficient implementation,” Ibrahim told BusinessDay.
“Everybody is worried about the rising incidence of leakages in public sector finance and as we have seen, the current anti-corruption policies of government have not eradicated corruption; rather, they are breeding a new set of corrupt individuals. So, they must come up with a more enduring approach,” he said.
Another big issue is the current huge judgment debts resulting from poorly conceived contracts which the previous heads of MDAs did not tie up properly, necessitating a review of the country’s contract agreements system that creates so much loopholes to the advantage of contractors.
This includes the controversial $9bn owed the Process and Industrial Developments Ltd (P&ID), a firm incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. The firm is seeking to seize $9 billion worth of Nigeria assets in the United Kingdom over an aborted gas supply agreement reached with the Federal Government in 2010.
The firm had alleged that government failed to honour contract agreements to supply gas to a processing plant in Calabar, Cross River State.
BusinessDay gathered that the case which came up in a UK court in June has been hanging due to the absence of ministers.
Bougei Attah, national coordinator, Procurement Observation and Advocacy Initiative (PRADIN), wants to see a more strengthened Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), as part of “strong institutional mechanisms to check leakages”.
“The BPP Act had never been implemented as required,” Attah said, citing part 1, Section 1 of the Act that deals with “establishment of the National Council on Procurement (NPC)”. “This is despite several warnings that the absence of the Council in the face of implementation of other parts of the law is illegal and renders all actions carried out under the Act null and void,” he said.
He said the Act was “one of the sunshine laws established under the World Bank recommendations in 2000” to help fight the corruption scourge, accusing those he described as a few elite in government of deliberately working to weaken the BPP Act and, consequently, its success because of pecuniary gains.
He also cited a provision in Section 149 of the yet-to-be-passed Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) as part of attempts to undermine the powers of BPP, by stipulating that “the National Oil Company (NOC) shall not be subject to the Public Procurement Act PPA”.
In a tweet, however, the president had said the incoming ministers would receive clear implementation targets tied to their portfolios.
“We will ensure these targets are complied with; performance will be monitored by the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation,” he said.
Emmanuel Onyema, chairman of Oryx Projects, called for better collaboration between the executive and legislature in checking leakages even as he also blamed the problem on failure of oversight responsibilities of the National Assembly.
The procurement expert challenged the current National Assembly to make a difference.
“The National Assembly has the enormous responsibilities to ensure that contracts are properly executed in accordance with the laws because they appropriate the funds, but over the years, many had pursued other gains to the detriment of national development. So, let us hope that the 9th National Assembly will do better,” he said.
Segun Imohiosen, spokesman for BPP, who also commented on the efforts to implement the Act, said the agency has established the “Price Checker”, a mechanism that will ensure that the agency uploads products prices directly from the manufacturers to check the activities of fraudulent contractors. The system is expected to harmonise prices and help the BPP set benchmarks for all MDAs.
“We are keying into the Federal Government’s Ease of Doing Business policy as part of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan,” he said.
