The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) of Nigeria, says it has empower tertiary institutions benefiting from its interventions to terminate and sanction erring contractors caught in mishandling of projects across the public higher institutions.
The Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, made this known in Abuja at the weekend during the 2021 Annual General Meeting of the Procurement Professionals Association of Nigeria (PPAN), which also featured election into its executive positions.
Echono who acknowledged challenges of high cost of materials in the last one year, said the agency had been coping with the situation, as it had designed ways of responding to the development.
The TETFund ES added that the agency is working with regulatory authorities to get support towards ensuring that there were no abandoned projects in its beneficiary institutions.
“We would be working closely with the regulatory authorities to see how we can get support for this and ensure that we don’t have abandoned projects because ultimately, it is better to solve the problem today; the more you delay, the more the cost will increase and the greater the complications will be”
“And some of them where the fault is that of the contractor, we are not only recommending terminations, we are also recommending sanctions. But there are other areas where the fault is basically what you call force major, it’s external to everybody,” he said.
Speaking on tackling corruption in procurement, he described corruption as one of the manifestations or incentives for mis-procurement, adding that a good procurement is the one that delivers on the objective especially of the procurement at the right time and at the right cost to the satisfaction of all.
“Procurement is the major source of pecuniary gain because more often than not the contract system has become so endemic and embedded in our system that people also see it as a main source
He advised on Professionalising the sector adding that this will ensure that those who carry out those activities are trained to do so.
“We need to reinforce the system, our checks, the regulatory functions; the role of all our anti-corruption agencies should be more preventive”
“Working with Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) and other anticorruption agencies, we are designing mechanisms to improve on those processes that will detect, disrupt and also prevent them,” he said.
Also speaking, the Chairman Board of Trustees of Public Procurement Association of Nigeria, Engr Emeka Eze, expressed satisfaction at the clarification that projects approved for TETFund’s beneficiary institutions have no entanglements.
Eze said the approach encourages the institutions to engage the services of contractors of their choice as provided under the Public Procurement Act, adding that by so doing, TETFund was encouraging good procurement practice in the institutions.
Eze, who was also a former Director General of the Bureau of Public Procurement, said in tackling corruption in public procurement, instead of criminalising administrative misbehaviour, the country should improve on administrative sanctions.
According to him, this means ensuring that the contractors involved are debarred and heads of agencies involved in procurement are removed or posted out or procurement functions entirely removed from them.
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