Olaopa Outlines Ways to Curb Procurement Abuse for Development Projects

Prof. Tunji Olaopa, the chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), has suggested strategies to prevent misuse of public procurement and guarantee honesty in spending for national development.

Olaopa gave a speech on Saturday at the Procurement Professionals Association of Nigeria (PPAN) webinar.

“Enthroning Integrity in Public Expenditure: A Procurement Question” was the theme of Olaopa’s speech. He claims that public procurement is more than just a purchasing and supply function; it is an implementation tool for budget execution as well as a true economic growth tool for accomplishing the “Nigeria First” local content and made-in-Nigeria national economic diversification strategy.

According to him, the effectiveness and efficiency with which the procurement process transforms Ministries, Departments, and Agencies’ (MDAs) resource allocations, programs, and projects into functional roads, medications and drugs in hospitals, classrooms, security assets, digital systems, and social services, all at acceptable quality, is particularly important for budget performance and credibility.

However, he bemoaned the fact that procurement has become a high-risk area for collusion, corruption, and poor management.

Therefore, he believes that obtaining the best results from public procurement is essential. The professionalization of the procurement cadre and supportive capacity building programs, which culminate in SPESSE (the Sustainable Procurement, Environmental and Social Standard Enhancement) program, he said, might accomplish this.

“SPESSE and cadre professionalization are defining strengths, enablers, and investment enrichment leverages and opportunities to continue developing procurement professionalism, competence, certification, and irreducible standards of professional practices in the procurement cadre.”He stated, “SPESSE is a true benchmark program created to develop sustainable capacity across procurement and related standards, including centers of excellence and scaled certification targets that must therefore be seen to be optimized.”

Additionally, he emphasized the necessity of enacting a substantial cultural shift in procurement reform, which entails a “narrative shift” from seeing contracts as a weapon for political favor, personal gain, or nepotism to seeing them as a tool of public good.

“This change won’t be only a formal one. In order to turn procurement departments into integrity systems, procurement participants’ organizational and behavioral perspectives must shift from “business as usual” to incentive and merit-based commitment.
With significant concessions for quality and performance throughout the contract life cycle, such a system operates with tools intended to change procurement from being purely focused on the lowest price to obtaining greatest value for money.
These integrity organizations operate according to standards and metrics that have structurally shifted from the arbitrary awarding of contracts to a merit-based system that makes use of standard procedures, transparent audit trails, and specialized procurement officials.
He continued, “In fact, this department has implemented e-procurement systems in a way that technically decreased human interaction and increased index-based accountability.”

In order to report on trends, opportunities, and advancements, he asked the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) and others to monitor performance improvements. They should then build on these achievements by reinforcing the procurement process’s built-in independent verifications and transparency procedures.

He stated that rather than only acting as a “gatekeeper,” the BPP should evolve into what he called a “system architect.”

The ability to establish standards, compile evidence of violations or professionalism, and evaluate them as a foundation for action, focusing on behavior change and advancing consequence management, is currently BPP’s greatest enduring value.Therefore, BPP needs to be upgraded from its traditional role of simply reviewing completed plans to guiding agencies along trajectories of continuous learning and incremental improvement; driving digital transformation of procurement processes; focusing more on proactive procurement planning to prevent corrupt practices rather than just detecting them; strengthening the current price intelligence system to combat over-invoicing and ensure value for money; implementing process reviews and modeling to reduce procurement process cycle-time from months to a few weeks; building a comprehensive digitized database for contractors, consultants, and procurement officers, he said.

Olaopa also called for the enforcement of quality assurance and the monitoring of price trends and framework rotation as necessary in order to prevent cartels.

The Renewed Hope Agenda could strengthen these reforms by moving procurement from process compliance to integrity-driven delivery, where every naira is traceable from budget to contract performance and public value, he said, pointing out that Nigeria’s procurement reform story since 2007 was not one of failure but rather one of foundations laid and gains achieved.