Abuja – The Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC) on Wednesday urged the Federal Government to be open with information on award and execution of government’s contracts, to curtail corruption.
The Chief Executive Officer, PPDC, Mrs Seember Nyager, made the call in Abuja at the launching of the Open Contracting Data Standards template for Federal Government’s Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
Nyager explained that when adopted, the template would promote procurement monitoring and address issues of corruption plaguing the award and execution of contracts in the country.
According to her, this will provide solutions to issues of inflated and duplicated contracts and ensure effective service delivery.
Nyager said that the PPDC had come up with the template which would show at a glance relevant details concerning a specific project, to promote openness in procurement process.
She added that the template would provide uniform data standards to enable anyone to compare data related to pricing or contract specifications.
She said that this would form the basis for verifying the performance of public contracts.[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”70560″]
“Open Contracting Data Standards template is something that is being adopted in several other countries and we are happy to introduce it to Nigeria.
“It is meant to liberate information around public expenditure, make it more coherent and easier to link to various procurement stages from the budget stage to procurement, contract implementation and public service stage.
“At the moment, it could be quite difficult to link a budget line to procurement data and eventually public service.
“But sometimes it is not because they were not executed, but because it was put in a different format, which makes tracing it for monitoring by anyone difficult.
“This template would also act as an analytical tool to easily discover red flags in the procurement system,” she said.
Nyager said that the template would also guide government on selecting contractors for its projects.
She explained that it would enable a person to see at a glance, the stage of execution of a project by a contractor.
Nyager added that if a contractor did not complete his projects, it would easily be found out.
According to her, at the moment, PPDC is working with relevant government agencies such as the Bureau of Public Procurement to ensure that the template is adopted.
Nyager said the template was also in line with the Federal Government’s proposed Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) system which would take effect from 2016.
“With the ZBB Budgeting, procurement will take a new face and we are excited about it.
“We think that ZBB is the way to go because budgeting is based on relevance.
“There is no static project in the budget anymore. You are not budgeting because a certain project was in the budget last year so it must be captured.
“No, it is now relevance, so this fits right into it and complements the system of zero budgeting,” she said.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported that procurement officers from various Federal Government’s MDAs attended the meeting (NAN).
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