By Felix Khanoba
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) says it is working with regulatory authorities to ensure that none of the contractors handling any of its various intervention projects in beneficiary tertiary institutions in the country abandon such work.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc Sonny Echono, made this known at the 2021 Annual General Meeting of the Procurement Professionals Association of Nigeria (PPAN) in Abuja on Saturday.
The TETFund boss, who also warned contractors engaged in the Fund’s interventional project on the need to deliver according to contractual agreement, said he has recommended outright termination of contracts and sanctions for erring contractors that fail to live up to expectations.
Echono, who however, acknowledged challenges of high cost of materials in recent times, said the Fund has been coping with the situation as it has designed ways of responding to it.
“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.
“So, we are working in a very nimble manner, we are working with the contractors, institutions. We are already meeting. The whole of last week we met with so many institutions that have such challenges and we continue for the rest of this week. We are finding solutions.
“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 of unearned income.
“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.
Also speaking, the Chairman Borad of Trustees of Public Procurement Association of Nigeria, Engr Emeka Eze, expressed happiness 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, also a former Director General of the Bureau of Public Procurement, said in tackling corruption in public procurement, instead of criminalising administrative misbehaviours, the country should improve on administrative sanctions.
