Enthroning Integrity in Public Procurement Practice in Nigeria

By Tunji Olaopa

In facilitating service delivery, the government is involved in series of current and recurrent expenditures to pursue public projects and programs that are meant to activate government’s plans, policies and purposes for her citizens. In this whole dynamic, public procurement acts as veritable instrument for translating budgets into goods, services and works for driving economic growth and poverty reduction. This simple fact tells us that procurement goes beyond just a mere purchasing and supply function. Indeed, within the challenges of overcoming the constraining monocultural dependence on crude oil, Nigeria pursues economic diversification programmes like the “Nigeria First” initiative designed to be catalytic for the creation and production of local contents to boost the national economy. The subtext in the overarching policy objective is to achieve a credible budget performance premised on how the MDAs effectively and efficiently deploy the procurement process to convert resource allocations, programmes and projects into functioning and quality infrastructural development, from good road networks, functional healthcare service, and quality education to security assets, digital systems, and social services.

It becomes immediately obvious therefore why public procurement, within the high-risk and low-trust context of Nigeria is often seen as an invitation to more public sector rent-seeking, grand corruption and mismanagement. Public procurement is indeed still regarded as the vulnerable domain where the largest leakages in public expenditure often occur, through inflated costs, poorly assessed and defined needs, opaque awards, weak contract management, and compromised transparency and accountability.

This was the narrative that set the stage for government’s deliberate reform act that led to the Public Procurement Act of 2007 (PPA) and its required successor reforms. The PPA galvanized reform and its theory of change is meant to streamline and put in place guidelines that support competition, fairness, integrity, transparency and accountability as framework of value for money spent and invested on development programmes. The Act also established the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) that serves as the central regulatory agency for laying the solid foundation for institutionalizing due process, competition, and strong ethical values in public procurement. The result is a tremendous and remarkable, measurable, and significant transformation of the procurement process. For example, there has been more standardization, stronger programme planning, project reviews and discipline. The BPP is ingraining a culture of rigorous bid reviews and tender evaluation, and credible capacity development pathways, including the World Bank-supported Sustainable Procurement, Environment and Social Standard Enhancement project, as well as other related professionalization programs. All these have induced significant credibility and savings as a result of due process compliance enforcement, price intelligence and contract review, which while requiring continuous independent validation, signal the material and fiscal upside of compliance and scrutiny.

This is unarguably the right kind of reform action that Nigeria’s democratic governance needs to function efficiently in terms of policy and project implementation and service delivery to Nigerians. Unfortunately, it is not such smooth sailing for the implementation of the PPA. And the problem is the same old devils in the detail of reform policies and actions that assail governance and institutional reforms. The World Bank once released a damning research finding about development policy and project management and reform programme implementation in Africa. A report that noted that only 29% of reforms ever got completed; 45% of on-going reform projects are rated unsatisfactory; and 26% of these reforms usually get cancelled. This study was carried out in 2005; and sadly today, the reality is still within the prophetic doom of the assessment. In the same manner, and despite the brilliant policy reflection that had gone into the PPA, together with the significant achievements the BPP had scored, there are still lots of implementation hindrances and constraints that are preventing the PPA from taking public procurement in Nigeria to a salutary point that democratic governance needs it to be.

Let me briefly highlight four such loopholes that spotlight how the lack of integrity in the procurement process is built into structural and personnel practices that undermine the PPA itself. In other words, the challenge is that of how to allow the procurement process stimulate economic growth through, for example, the increase in the value of domestic content and products without creating additional rent-seeking or cartel behavior. This is how the “Nigeria First” initiative is meant to catalyze the reform that the PPA seeks.

One, we cannot discountenance the many significant loopholes in the procurement process that encourage politicians and government officials to exercise discretionary capacities and personal judgments that interfere in the legal and statutory ramifications of the due process involved in tender evaluation and contracting in procurement. These subjective judgments and loopholes allow for either the ability to evade the guidelines of the BPP, or the intrusion of political considerations in the selection of contractors. There is also the structural latitude that procurement officials enjoy that limits the possibility of fair and transparent dealing. The use of direct contracting, for instance, makes it possible for officials to become too discretionary in the interpretation of technical requirements, thereby ensuring that critical rules about, say competitive biddings, are bypassed to favor specific bidders or contractors. Two, contract implementation and payment system, within the in-built “exception pathway,” allow for gross abuse which makes it even more difficult to monitor transparency. Lastly, many of these procurement-related abuses and misconducts are not appropriately detected, sanctioned and punished due to the weak and almost non-existent rules that flag non-compliance.

In order to begin reflection on the next steps to take in achieving a paradigmatic shift that transforms the procurement process, the most pragmatic thing is not to rush into reform. Rather, reform wisdom demands that we think deep first about the change management issues that should clear the path for genuine and impactful reforms including reforming of the many reforms. The first cogent point to note is that the BPP, as the central agency overseeing accountability and transparency in the procurement process needs to transcend its gatekeeping role and upgrade into being a system architect. In other words, the BPP needs to grow beyond the traditional responsibility of safeguarding professionalism and setting institutional standards to proactively guiding MDAs along the trajectories of continuous learning and incremental improvements. This upgrading allows the BPP to leverage global instruments, like the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) model law on procurement, the OECD Principles of Integrity in Public Procurement or South Korea’s Korea Online E-Procurement System (KONEPS), to benchmark smart and best practices against which to set the reform of the system.

Second, it is equally imperative for the government, and the BPP, to push for a fundamental culture change that will shift the institutional narrative about procurement and contract away from its understanding as patronage—a tool for personal gain, nepotism, or political favour—to viewing them as instrument for gaining public value and democratic governance. This critical reform shift will not be merely procedural. Instead, it will require transforming organisational and behavioral mindsets of procurement players from the “business as usual” to an incentive and merit-based commitment to transforming procurement departments into integrity systems. Third, it becomes urgently imperative to strive to deepen and consolidate the already advanced professionalization of the procurement cadres by leveraging such capacity development programmes, initiatives and instruments like the SPESSE, in a measure to further strengthen and advance professionalism, competence, and certification and other practices. Fourth, the government needs to realize the fiscal value derivable from waste reduction and efficiency savings. This involves the BPP becoming proactive in its efforts to track and report performance progress while instituting standards for waste avoidance through stringent procurement reviews, policy intelligence, independent verification and transparency methodologies. It is the in-built incentives, structural capabilities, regulatory effectiveness, and the reliability of enforcement that enable the procurement systems to work according to our desired reform aspirations.

I will conclude this reflection by highlighting six reform pillars that should backstop the reform efforts to reinforce the PPA and the efforts of the BPP to enthrone integrity as the core value required in the procurement process. These pillars feed into the overall actionable reform architecture to deepen the Renewed Hope Agenda and its prioritization of fiscal discipline, value for money, local production, and restored trust. Pillar one calls for the hardening of the front door in the procurement process—that is, the planning and procurement design—through the stipulation of standardized specification criteria for goods and services, mandatory procurement quality procedures and framework agreement for purchases. Pillar two insists on the imperative of inserting transparency into the entire procurement process, from end to end. This requires, for example, the adoption of open and structured data standards and analytics that detect red flags early enough.

Pillar three demands that the BPP see to it that all exception loopholes must be blocked. This means that all emergency or single-sourced procedure must be justified and logged. Pillar four concerns the significance of professionalism and professionalization of procurement officers and processes in ways that protect them from political interferences, ensure that career progression is tied to continuous training and certification that facilitate constant learning, and instigate professional discipline. Pillar five requires the BPP to shift the focus of integrity in the system to contract delivery. This can be achieved, for example, through contract performance dashboard that monitors the basic elements involved from time to cost, and performance scoring that not only monitors how contractors handle procurement, but also put sanctions in place to control impunity. Pillar six takes the BPP to task in foregrounding integrity within the ‘Nigeria First’ project. This will ensure setting up of quality assurance and competitive safeguards and standards to guide the local contents against corruption and cartelization.

Within the ambit of the Renewed Hope Agenda, integrity takes a critical spotlight as a delivery strategy. This provides a framework by which we can assess the PPA and the constitutional efforts of the BPP not as failures but as a continuing series of efforts to ground the procurement process against ingrained attitudes of corruption and patronage while building a stronger integrity-driven service delivery that is founded on budget performance, contract management and the efficiency of public value as the core foundation of democratic governance in Nigeria.

*Being a presentation at the Procurement Professionals Association of Nigeria (PPAN) Webinar by Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, on March 28, 2026.