House of Reps drop Adeosun as chairman of the national council on public procurement
- House of Representatives remove Kemi Adeosun as chairman of the national council on public procurement following the alterations of the bill for an Act to amend the Public Procurement Act, 2007
- Adeosun will be replaced by a person to be appointed by the president with the introduction of a new section
- Speaker of the House, Yakubu Dogars, says the essence of the bill is to sanitise Nigeria’s business environment
The minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun, has been removed from the post of chairman of the national council on public procurement by the House of Representatives.
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Her removal from the council was done following the alterations passed by the House on a bill for an Act to amend the Public Procurement Act, 2007 as passed by the House, PM News reports.
A major amendment of the bill was the removal of minister of finance as chairman of the national council on public procurement.
The minister will now be replaced with a person to be appointed by the president.
Section 35 (1) of the bill increased mobilisation fee to contractors or suppliers from 15 to not more than 50 percent or more as may be prescribed by the Bureau, while section 35(3) prescribes 2 years jail term as punishment for “any person or authority who accesses mobilisation fee and absconds or does not carry out the services or works commensurate to the fee paid shall be guilty of an offence and punishable with 2 years imprisonment or a fine equivalent to the fee paid or both".
Section 25(3) of the law shortens the time provided in the bill for emergency procurement activity to ensure timely execution but “the procurement entity acting with respect to paragraph (i) of this section shall notify the Bureau within 7 days of such action".
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Similarly, the new law provides for the establishment of Parastatal Tenders Board in each Federal ministry, extra-ministerial department and all agencies of government, and includes the National Defense and National Security Agencies which hitherto were excluded from the procurement processes.
In an effort to increase public access to procurement activities, the House bill introduced a new section 5 (f) which mandates the Bureau to “publish the details of all contracts in the procurement journal, any other national newspapers and in their official website; while subsection (h) states that the Bureau shall maintain a national database of the particulars, classification, and categorisation of federal contractors, suppliers, consultants and service providers".
Commenting on the bill, speaker, Yakubu Dogara noted that the essence of the bill is to sanitise Nigeria’s business environment and improve the ease of doing business in the country by ensuring that Nigeria has value for money by ensuring smoother implementation of national budgets as passed by the National Assembly.
Explaining the rationale behind the amendment, Dogara said that the extant provision runs contrary to “the principle of natural justice, where you sit as a judge on your own matter."
Meanwhile, President Muhammadu Buhari has directed the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun and the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, to act appropriately and with dispatch in releasing the second tranche of the London-Paris Club refunds to the states in order to ease their financial hardships.
The president, who addressed the meeting of the National Economic Council made up of state governors and chaired by the vice-president on Thursday in Abuja, however, made a strong case for settlement of unpaid salaries and pension liabilities of their workers.
Source: Legit.ng
