*Preventive Procurement Governance: Why President Tinubu Should Entrust Special Intervention and Consistuency Projects to the Bureau of Public Procurement for Nigeria’s 2027 Budget.*
_By Olanrewaju O. Ogunmilua, PhD_
As the Federal Government prepares the 2027 Budget, attention will settle where it usually settles: on revenue projections, expenditure ceilings and the distribution of capital projects across Ministries, Departments and Agencies. Yet the developmental value of an appropriation is not determined by its size. It is determined by whether government obtains the right projects, from capable hands, at defensible prices, and whether anyone competent is watching while the work is done. Nigeria’s difficulty has never been the absence of plans or the insufficiency of allocations. It is that public money leaks at three identifiable points across the procurement cycle, long before the stage at which the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission becomes relevant.
The first leak occurs when a price is fixed without proper scrutiny. The second occurs when the contract is awarded to a firm that was never capable of delivering it. The third occurs when the work is handed to an institution with neither the mandate nor the competence to supervise its execution. Prosecution addresses none of these, because prosecution arrives after mobilisation has been paid and the site abandoned. It is against this backdrop that this article argues for preventive procurement governance: the deliberate placement of professional procurement capacity across the whole cycle rather than at its policing end. The first two reforms lie within the existing powers of the Bureau of Public Procurement. The third will require Mr President’s executive power.
*The First Failure: Prices Fixed Before Anyone Checks Them*
Nigeria’s budget routinely contains similar projects implemented by different MDAs at widely differing prices. Without price benchmarking applied at the preparation stage, inflated estimates enter the appropriation before any procurement process begins, and by the time a certificate of no objection is sought the inflated figure has already been legislated. The Bureau is then reduced to arguing about a number the National Assembly has approved. That is a weak position from which to defend the public purse. Two distinct problems sit behind this. Some inflated estimates originate in executive drafting, where the Budget Office of the Federation must assemble many thousands of line items without independent price verification behind them. Others, and on the available evidence the larger share, arrive afterwards as legislative insertions over which the Budget Office exercises no control at all. Both are procurement failures, and neither is cured by scrutiny applied once the Appropriation Act has been signed.
The Public Procurement Act 2007 already requires it to monitor the prices of tendered items and to keep a national database of standard prices, and the establishment of pricing standards and benchmarks sits among its stated objectives. The Price Intelligence Unit is therefore the belated operationalisation of a mandate that has sat on the statute books for close to two decades. The question for 2027 is not whether the function is authorised. It is whether the data reaches the drafting table early enough to be used. The practical instrument is the budget call circular: reference price bands supplied by the Bureau and embedded in the circular issued to MDAs would place verification at the point where estimates are first assembled, leaving ownership of the budget process where the Constitution places it while giving the Budget Office an evidential basis it presently lacks for challenging a submission. On that footing the Bureau supplies the evidence and the Budget Office holds the gate, which is both the more accurate division of labour and the more durable one.
*The Second Failure: Contracts Awarded to Firms That Cannot Deliver*
Nearly two decades after the Public Procurement Act, Nigeria still operates a generalised contractor registration model. Once registration requirements are satisfied, a firm with a ₦20 million turnover and a firm with a ₦100 billion balance sheet occupy substantially the same procurement environment, and newly incorporated companies compete for the same projects as established multinationals. The consequences are familiar to anyone who has watched a site go quiet: unrealistic bidding, fronting and proxy contracting, excessive subcontracting, abandoned works. Genuine small and medium enterprises are among the principal losers, since they are made to compete against firms of vastly superior resources rather than within a tier suited to their capacity.
The governing principle here is proportionality. The UNCITRAL Model Law on Public Procurement requires that qualification criteria be proportionate to the procurement in question, so that what a bidder must demonstrate rises with what the contract demands. Nigeria’s generalised registration model fails that test at the threshold, since it asks substantially the same of a firm bidding for a borehole and a firm bidding for a dam. The Model Law states the principle but does not prescribe the machinery for giving effect to it, and a standing classification register is one administrative route among several. What recommends it in Nigeria’s case is that per-procurement assessment presupposes an evaluation capacity that most MDAs do not possess, whereas a central register places the assessment once, in the hands of an institution equipped to make it.
The instructive precedent is South African. The Construction Industry Development Board, established under the CIDB Act 38 of 2000, maintains a Register of Contractors grading firms from 1 to 9 by financial standing and works capability across five primary classes of work, and public sector clients are legally barred from awarding construction contracts above a contractor’s grade. Grade 1 requires no track record at all, which keeps entry open; Grade 9 carries no upper ceiling. Significantly for the SME question, contractors holding Potentially Emerging status may bid one grade above their registration, creating a deliberate progression pathway rather than a permanent ceiling. A Nigerian adaptation would classify contractors by demonstrated capacity across national strategic, federal, state, local and MSME tiers, with a reserved category for youth-owned, women-owned and cooperative enterprises consistent with the Bureau’s existing affirmative procurement commitments.
A classification register is of limited use without performance data behind it. The Bureau should therefore maintain a national digital contractor performance database capturing completion history, delivery timelines, quality ratings, contract terminations, litigation and procurement sanctions, so that future eligibility is linked to past delivery. By implication, a contractor that abandons a project would find the next opportunity harder to obtain, which is a discipline the presentu system does not impose. This can be achieved through the Bureau’s existing regulatory and standard-setting powers, with statutory amendment pursued subsequently where stronger backing proves necessary.
*The Third Failure: Delivery Without Supervision*
Suppose both preceding reforms succeed. The price has been benchmarked and the contractor is properly graded. The project can still fail, and frequently does, because nobody with the capacity or the incentive to supervise it is anywhere near the site. Excessive variations, specification changes, post-award cost escalation and outright abandonment are execution failures, not pricing failures, and they are where Nigerian budgets have historically died. Supervision is the part of the cycle that receives the least institutional attention and destroys the most value.
The reason is visible in how implementation responsibility is presently allocated. In August 2026, the Transmission Company of Nigeria confirmed paying ₦1.28 billion for solar streetlight projects falling outside its statutory mandate, explaining that they had been inserted into its capital budget by the National Assembly as constituency projects under the 2026 Appropriation Act, and that it neither requested nor initiated them. A separate review of the same Act identified approximately ₦29.59 billion for solar street lights, transformers and rural electrification allocated under the Federal Co-operative College, Oji River, an academic institution with no conceivable competence in rural electrification. Analysis of the 2025 budget had already documented ₦393.29 billion across 1,477 streetlight projects at an average of ₦266.4 million each. The significance of these cases is not merely that the assignments were irregular. It is that no such agency can supervise what it was handed and completely outside its mandate. A transmission company has no field inspectorate for streetlights and a college of co-operatives cannot certify a rural electrification site, so the contractor is, in practice, unsupervised from mobilisation to abandonment.
What the pattern makes plain is that Nigeria lacks a permanent implementing institution positioned close enough to the work to supervise it. The regional development commissions are the obvious candidate. Nigeria now has six zonal commissions covering the North East, North West, North Central, South East, South West and South South, alongside the older Niger Delta Development Commission, each mandated to operate within a defined region rather than nationally. Routing eligible Special Intervention and constituency projects to these bodies, while Ministries retain national policy, regulation and technical standards, would produce four things a distant MDA cannot: continuous monitoring by staff who can reach the site, structured engagement with host communities who observe the contractor daily, consolidated procurement of standardised items across a zone, and measurable performance, because each commission would carry named responsibility for delivering agreed outcomes within its region.
This is not to say that regionalisation is self-executing. The commissions are young, although a few have been criticised for slow translation of mandate into visible activity, and handing implementation to a body that lacks procurement capacity simply relocates the problem rather than solving it. The transfer must therefore arrive together with certified procurement professionals deployed and supervised by the Bureau, not ahead of them. Worthy of note is that this third reform, unlike the first two, cannot be delivered by the Bureau acting alone. It touches legislative practice on constituency insertions and requires direction from the President. That is precisely why it belongs at the end of the sequence rather than the beginning: the first two reforms establish that professional procurement capacity produces measurable fiscal results, and it is on that record that the case for extending the model to project delivery properly rests.
*What Preventive Governance Requires of the Bureau*
These three reforms hold together only if one institution carries oversight across them. The Bureau of Public Procurement should certify and deploy procurement professionals to the regional commissions, issue specialised guidelines for Special Intervention Projects, maintain the reference price database and the contractor register, subject major contract variations to fresh price-intelligence review where they exceed defined thresholds, and conduct periodic compliance audits whose findings are referred to the anti-graft agencies, working alongside the Budget Office of the Federation and the Ministry of Finance rather than above them. Certification of completed work by procurement units before payment is authorised is the least glamorous element of this list and probably the most consequential.
*Conclusion:*
As preparations for the 2027 Budget advance, the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) should therefore be repositioned as a strategic institution of government. Given that the DG BPP (Dr Adebowale Adedokun) is putting his best foot forward to ensure that procurement is the principal mechanism through which budgetary allocations are converted into roads, schools, hospitals, agricultural infrastructure, water projects and other public services, there is a compelling case for the BPP not to only have a seat at the Federal Executive Council, but most fundamentally; that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should consider entrusting the BPP with a strengthened coordinating and oversight mandate for Special Intervention and Constituency Projects under the 2027 Budget, working with the relevant Ministries, Departments and Agencies and the Geo-Political Development Commissions. Such an arrangement would place professional procurement officers at the critical points of project identification, costing, contractor selection, implementation monitoring, milestone certification and performance evaluation.
The objective should not be to weaken the statutory responsibilities of implementing institutions or the constitutional appropriation and oversight functions of the National Assembly. Rather, it should be to establish an independent professional procurement firewall between political project selection and the expenditure of public resources.
Under such a framework, Constituency and Special Intervention Projects would remain instruments for responding to genuine community development needs, but their implementation would be subjected to rigorous price intelligence, transparent competition, contractor due diligence, professional project monitoring and verifiable delivery standards.
This is where preventive procurement governance can become one of the strongest institutional deterrents to corruption. Instead of waiting for anti-corruption agencies to investigate failed projects after public funds have been lost, the BPP would help prevent inflated pricing, contract splitting, duplication, procurement manipulation, poor contractor selection and payment for uncompleted projects before they occur.
The 2027 Budget therefore provides President Tinubu with an opportunity to undertake a fundamental reform of Nigeria’s public expenditure architecture: *elevate the Bureau of Public Procurement to the highest level of economic decision-making, strengthen its role in the Federal Executive Council, and place professional procurement governance at the heart of Special Intervention and Constituency Project implementation.*
If properly designed within the existing constitutional and statutory framework, this reform could fundamentally change the relationship between appropriation and implementation. The measure of a successful budget would no longer be how many projects are inserted into the Appropriation Act, but how many are transparently procured, reasonably priced, professionally executed, completed on schedule and delivering measurable benefits to Nigerians.
President Tinubu has the opportunity to make the 2027 Budget a turning point—from *reactive anti-corruption to preventive procurement governance; from fragmented intervention spending to accountable project delivery; and from budgetary promises to measurable development outcomes.*
Olanrewaju O. Ogunmilua, PhD, is a Procurement Expert. He can be reached at Email: [email protected].
