Chairman of Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Dr Musa Adamu Aliyu, has said the commission, with the help of the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), has intercepted and blocked $300,000 meant for students Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
Aliyu, who made the disclosure, yesterday, in Abuja during the Centre for Media Policy and Accountability (CMPA) one-day National Policy Dialogue on Anti-Corruption at the ICPC auditorium, stressed the need for synergy among sister agencies to block the excesses of corrupt officials before they were perpetrated.
“It was BPP that gave us an idea because something strange was happening concerning the students’ facilities and it was then we had to look properly and make recoveries, and blocked $300,000 in one of the accounts as well as recovered an expensive vehicle.
Recall that Aliyu Aliyu had disclosed in October that over N13 billion in public funds were diverted in September 2024 alone.
He said: “Over the past year, the ICPC has made significant progress in discharging its mandate. For example, we recovered over N13 billion in diverted public funds in September 2024 alone. This is just one of the many ways we have worked tirelessly to fulfil our mandate.”
The Director General of the Bureau for Public Procurement (BPP), Dr Adebowale Adedokun, who declared an end to the era where the same contractors win public projects year-in-year-out, sidelining other qualified contractors registered on the Federal Government’s database, admitted that the processes had never been transparent and promised an inclusive process going forward.
Declaring about 60,000 contractors registered in the database, the DG noted that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had charged the agency on the need to open up the process for over 5,000 contractors captured in the database to compete equally to reduce corruption in the process.
He added that the agency was on the verge of introducing the e-procurement process to limit human factors in the process and make the process more transparent for other sister agencies to monitor.
“Our role as procurement officers is that we want to see that if you are building a lecture theatre, can we see that lecture theatres have value. We want to see roads where the prices and the costs are not inflated and the quality is guaranteed.
“We want to see schools being built with the resources the government has provided without anybody pleading for it. We think that by the time all of us allow openness, accountability and fairness to reign, we can begin to reduce unemployment.
“We can reduce the stagnation in the economy because contractors can trust government that if they bid for a contract, they can win, and then if they win, it will trickle down to their environment, their communities. So what the President has asked us in BPP to do is get Nigerians to get contracts, and give them opportunities to win. If they win, they can affect their community.”
