The Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, (TETFund), Arc Sonny Echono, has recommended termination of contracts and sanctions for erring contractors handling projects in institutions benefiting from its various interventions.
Echono spoke in Abuja on Saturday at the 2021 Annual General Meeting of the Procurement Professionals Association of Nigeria which also featured election into its executive positions.
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He said: “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.”
“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 of unearned incomes.”
“So, what we need to do is to professionalise the sector and 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 anticorruption agencies should be more preventive,” he said.