Fighting corruption in infrastructure delivery in Nigeria

In 2003, the Nigerian government set up the Budget Monitoring and Price Intelligence Unit (BMPIU) to halt corruption and incompetence in public procurement and service delivery. Stakeholders, including contractors, suppliers and end-users, have had diverse reactions to the initiative. How has it performed and what are its strengths and weaknesses?

A study for the ‘Partnering to Combat Corruption Series’, run by theWater, Engineering and Development Centre, at Loughborough University, in the UK, seeks to gaininsight into the BMPIU's operations and to highlight its strengths andweaknesses. It offers recommendations on how to ensure more effective,impact-orientated service delivery, especially for poor people. The research focuseson the BMPIU's impact on 'hard-naira savings' (the naira is Nigeria's domesticcurrency) in public procurement, as an easily identifiable and measurable cost reduction in service delivery.

The BMPIU aims to make contract awardingprocesses more transparent and to ensure compliance with the prescribedguidelines and procedures for capital project procurement and related goods andservices. It seeks to systematically unify recurrent and capital budgetexpenditures and build a framework that will bring about best practice methods.This should, in turn, lead to well-defined sector objectives and strategies. Capitalspending is monitored through audits, controls and computerisation.Techniques have been put in place to improve the costing of capital projects,while the Medium Term Expenditure Framework tries to ensure that items inministry budgets are in line with priority targets.

The BMPIU is crucial in theNigerian government's reform efforts to promote good governance through bettermanagement of public finances.  Thereform of both public procurement and the Medium Term Expenditure Framework hashelped improve public spending. However, the BMPIU has yet to assess the whole-lifecosting of procurement contracts to ensure current and future savings. Publicperception is that the BMPIU is performing below average.

The following havebeen identified as obstacles to the effective performance of the BMPIU:

• obstructive bureaucracy
• unduly long and unpredictable procedural processes
• lack of adequate information or disclosure
• ineffective data archiving and record-keepingpractices
• insufficient human resources. 

The procurementprocess is crucial to how potential investors and civil society view a country.A transparent procurement process is important for efficiency, in that itimproves the contestability of public procurement markets by providing allqualified potential suppliers the opportunity to bid. If procurement proceduresare unclear, incentives for farms to enter the market are reduced. 

The study made a number of recommendations to improve the BMPIU'soperation, including:

• The bureaucracy of the process needs to be reduced andthe stages of the approval process shortened to reduce the length of timeinvolved.
• A fixed timeframe needs to be introduced for thestart-to-completion process of certification to improve predictability. Thismay differ depending on the project type.
• Procedures must be put in place to ensure thatprocurement processes are followed correctly and that any action taken onprocurement is documented and can be substantiated.
• The BMPIU must conduct a far-reaching public awarenesscampaign to inform the public of its aims and activities in the effort to cleanup public procurement.
• The public should be notified of bid outcomes promptly, as delays allowmanipulation to occur and cause the public to doubt the transparency ofdecision-making.
• Measures need to be adopted to improve record-keeping to ensuretransparency.