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From: Ibini Olaide <ibini_olaide@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2016 12:06:22 +0000 (UTC)
To: ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com<ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>
ReplyTo: "ibini_olaide@yahoo.com" <ibini_olaide@yahoo.com>
Subject: Prof Olukotun's Column
ABANDONED PROJECTS AND STATE DECAY
AYO OLUKOTUN
If Nigeria were not a country with a pronounced abandoned project syndrome, the inauguration, on Tuesday, of a 23 member Electoral Reform Committee headed by Ken Nnamani, a former Senate President, would have been totally unnecessary and prodigal, for there exists in the archives of government a seminal and non-partisan electoral reform report which is the respected output of a Committee, chaired by Justice Muhammadu Uwais. The 2008 Uwais Report has only been half heartedly implemented by successive governments, and all that is needed is a technical committee to advice the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, on how best to implement its recommendations; but in a country of abandoned projects, a syndrome that derives partly from every government trying to,as it were, re-invent the wheel, about just anything can happen.
To elaborate on that point, a fortnight ago, this columnist listened to a consultant on Channels Television, who revealed that a decade or so ago, a committee he headed had the assignment to do an inventory of solid minerals in the country. The committee submitted a report that exists in governmental archives,and according to him, in the embassies of several countries that do bussiness in Nigeria. Apparently oblivious of this report,which must have cost the country a pretty amount, the Buhari administration has also committed quite some funding to do an inventory all over of solid minerals in the country. In the same connection, it will be interesting to see whether Buhari, if he agrees to restructure the country will be willing to simply dust up the Report of what is derisively referred to in government as the Jonathan Conference or will he start all over?
Shift your gaze to construction projects, and see the litany of abandoned projects that fill up the country. According to a former Director General of the Bureau of Public Procurement, there are 19,000 such projects in various stages of abandonment. That figure, presumably does not include projects begun and abandoned by State Governments. One often cited tragic example is a large scale water supply project started by a former governor of Kwara State, Late Muhammed Lawal. Virtually completed, the edifice was designed to solve the chronic water supply problem in Ilorin and neighbouring towns. When however, Lawal failed to win a second term, his successor , Dr. Bukola Saraki will not touch the project with a long pole, and it remains today an epitaph to a governmental culture of waste, hyper patisanship and dereliction.
It will be interesting if a doctoral student in Political Science, in one of our universities researches our abandoned project syndrome,for what insight it throws into a perverse governance culture, leadership atrophy, programmed dysfunction, a thriving spoils system, and the lack of monitoring mechanisms. Let us recall the famous definition of politics as a study of who gets what, when and how? This immediately opens a line of investigaton as to those who get awarded the juiciest contracts, some of which are never implemented, most of them half implemented with only a tiny proportion completed. Star novelist and academic, Professor Kole Omotosho gave an interesting example at a Convocation Lecture he delivered few years back, at the Federal University of Technology, Akure. Quoting the Niger-Delta professionals, a civil society monitoring group, Omotosho disclosed that a project to construct and equip a Federal Medical Centre at Ohanbile community, which contract was awarded to former Senate President, Adolphous Nwanbara, never saw the light of day.
Obviously, many examples of such projects exist in the chronicles of successive governments, especially, but not confined to the 16 year rule of The People's Democratic Party. I do not mean to suggest that Nigeria is the only country where governmental projects are begun and abandoned. This happens too in the United States, where for example, in the last or so decade, the Pentagon spent over 50billion dollars on 15 major programmes, according to Business Insider "without any fielded systems to show for it". In case you thought that this is another version of Dasukigate, this is not the case at all as the explanation is funding problem, attributed to the Budget Control Act.
In the United Kingdom, much was heard a decade and a half ago about abandoned Internet Technology projects, the most conspicous example being an elaborate National Health Service Patient Record System,whose abandonment cost the tax payers 10 Billion pounds. As a conservative Member of Parliament, Richard Bacon described it at the time "This saga is one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector". Obviously, no public sector in the world is immune to the waste , poor judgement, indiscretion and even corruption which in many cases produce abandoned projects, resulting in significant loss of public revenue. Successive reforms and so called public management paradigm shifts, have not been able to solve this problem. What we have in Nigeria however, are spectacular and tragically repetitive occurences of abandoned projects, with the result that many contracts, such as that of the Ore-Benin road, are awarded several times with little to show for the many awards.
The ongoing anti-corruption programme, whatever its limitations, seeks to return the conscience of a nation that is self destructing, because the state has been hijacked by successive waves of monumentally corrupt political elites, for whom government contracts have become the major avenue for siphoning public wealth into private accounts. Unfortunately, however, the programme has only scratched the surface of a deep and complex problem of endemic status. It was not so many years ago that Professor Pat Utomi revealed that no construction project undertaken by the federal government since 1999 had been fully completed. Worse still, nobody,as far as we know, has been brought to book over these costly abandonments, mainly because, it is the high profile politicians and their cronies who get the big projects anyway.
Sometimes, to be fair, the projects are abandoned because they are not fully funded by government or beacause a cash crunch has descended on a system that is vulnerable to downswings in commodity prices. But even at that, it is doubtful whether citizens ever got value for money paid out to contractors, before the onset of reccession. At any rate, it speaks volumes for our capacity to plan that adequate provision was not made for funding for the execution of projects, which have direct bearing on the welfare of the citizens. It is not enough to do an audit of abandoned projects or simply lament their high number. Sanctions should be meted out to those guilty of colluding to cheat the public in one way or another. In addition, the machinery of government should be streamlined, especially in hard times like these, to reduce duplication of projects by different arms of government, often embarking on them in an overlapping manner.
Perhaps it is time to re-visit the suggestion made recently by Eze that the offices of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, The Bureau of Public Procurements, as well as the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission,should be merged for better over sight and monitoring of projects. At any rate, it is time to frontally apprehend and arrest the mania of project abandonment.
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