Get Guardian on GoogleThe Director General of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (NIALS), Professor Muhammed Tawfiq Ladan, has stated that the ignorance of local government chairmen to the Public Procurement Act may land them in the net of anti-graft agencies in the country.
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Ladan who made this remark on Wednesday in Abuja at the Macarthur criminal justice cohort post-IACC engagement workshop put together by the Center for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity, insisted that the process will consume them because they lack knowledge about the Public Procurement Act.
He urged Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) working towards a corrupt-free society to gear up and prepare local government handlers with capacity building before they start receiving their allocations directly from the federal government, maintaining that state government may mock them when they start encountering problems.
His words: “If their capacity is not enhanced to put measures on ground around fiscal transparency and for them to see Public Procurement under the law as an anti-corruption strategic mechanism, quote me if we are not lucky, every six months to twelve months 20-30 procurement of local government chairmen in the country will end up in EFCC and ICPC net.
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“Umar your center will be in trouble when in the next 12 months they start receiving their allocations direct without passing through governors and without these capacities because they don’t know Public Procurement Act, that process alone will consume them.
“What will prevent this is that we need to begin to urgently assist them in building their capacity on fiscal transparency under this new autonomy and public procurement processes because this is where they will fail and this is where the state government will laugh at them. Even at the federal level how far have we gone.”
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