Procurement laws abuse worsens Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit – PPDC

The Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), a citizen sector organisation has said the abuse of public procurement laws is largely responsible for the nation’s infrastructural deficits.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of PPDC, Nkem Ilo, said this on Thursday in Abuja during a roundtable on fiscal transparency and accountability mechanisms in Nigeria and the launch of scoping study in Anambra, Akwa Ibom, Ekiti and Kaduna states organised by the PPDC and MacArthur Foundation.

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She said abuse of public procurement laws that lead to an infrastructural deficit is also harmful to the socio-economic development of the country.

“However, a disruption in this process through fraudulent or corrupt practices, mismanagement of funds, inefficient application of or non-compliance with the public procurement laws would therefore lead to an infrastructural deficit, epileptic or non-availability of public services,” she said.

Ilo, represented by the PPDC’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), Gift Maxwell, said in 2016, they successfully advocated for and piloted the Open Contracting Data Standards (OCDS) in Nigeria through their OCDS compliant platform called Budeshi (www.budeshi.ng).

She said that the platform assigns a unique identifier for contracts and ensures that contracts can be tracked for the project conception stage through to project delivery.

She said: “In the last five years, we have gone ahead to support seven states across Nigeria, including Anambra, Akwa Ibom, Ekiti, and Kaduna States in developing and deploying their open contracting portals.