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… this is an unwholesome trend-Gbajabiamila
By Emman Ovuakporie
The House of Representatives Speaker, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila has described as “ugly and dangerous” the trend of awarding government projects and abandoning them, only to commence new ones without completing those before them.
The Federal Ministry of Communication on Thursday blamed the non-completion of N4.179billion contracts for the supply and installation of radio monitoring equipment and other services to the death of two principal partners in the companies engaged by the Ministry.
Represented by the Chief Whip of the House, Hon. Mohammed Tahir Monguno, (APC, Borneo), Gbajabiamila said excellent infrastructure gives rise to growth and development of the economy.
This is just as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila has described the abandonment of projects as an unwholesome trend.
The speaker said: “It is disheartening to note that Nigeria’s infrastructure gap has been widening in recent years owing to, among other things the abandonment and lack of completion of capital projects. Why are projects abandoned?”, the Speaker asked.
“What are the reasons for non-completion of Projects? We need to provide answers to these and other related questions. Projects must be completed, and in record time as well.
“I make bold to say that if the House of Representatives, in its oversight responsibility doesn’t step in at this time, we run a high risk of continuing this path of unending national expenditure without verifiable value for money.
“This exercise is therefore very critical given that these abandoned projects have become a constant and ugly feature in our yearly national budgets and a conduit through which national resources are drained “, Gbajabiamila said.
On the part of the Ministry, the Permanent Secretary, Mr. Musa Istifanus noted that ICT is the highest contributing sector to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) outside petroleum, saying: “It’s a sector that’s supposed to take a chunk of our population out of poverty”.
He said: “As you aware the Ministry has one or two abandoned projects and the reason is that one of those contracts was terminated due to unresolved issues with the contractor and we’re in the process of seeing how we can get out of the contract and rearward it as the previous cost was $38million.
But when asked to explain the processes leading to the abandonment of radio monitoring equipment projects for which over a billion naira had been expended, the director of procurement, Mr. Olusanya Agbe stated that the contract had issues when one of the principal partners, Alhaji Dan Kabo died in 2004.
According to him, the over N4bn contract was divided into three different schedules, and that the Ministry released a total sum of N1.176 bn, out of which N675.2 million was utilized by the contractor and N501.7 million was unaccounted for – whilst saying that another principal partner of the onshore component also died shortly after collecting the sum of N200 million.
At this point, a member of the panel, Hon. Mukhtar Ahmed from Kaduna revealed that the said Dan Kabo being used as an excuse for project abandonment actually died on April 5, 2002 and not 2004 as claimed by the director, saying that they should find better answers to the questions before them instead of putting blames on a dead man.
When asked to recommend measures, the PermSec told the panel that he doesn’t see any relevance equipment produced in 2001 will have in 2008, saying that “currently, the Ministry is deploying radio monitoring equipment mounted on trucks and they are already becoming obsolete due to the arrival of updated ones into the market”.
He said since technology changes very rapidly, the only way to salvage the current situation is to reassess the whole procurement and restructure same from scratch.
The panel headed by Hon. Chukwuma Umeoji, queried the director asking if he would treat his personal business by giving out huge sums of money to contractors who will not deliver according to the terms, as well as failing to account for over half a billion naira, the same way he had handled government contracts, he kept quiet.
Also grilled are officials from the Nigerian Communications Satellite (NigComsat), the Galaxy Backbone, as well as the Nigeria Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) for various abandoned projects in their agencies despite yearly budgetary allocations to that effects.