PRESIDENT Bola Tinubu has approved a debarment policy to sanction contractors who execute poor-quality jobs or abandon projects.
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The Director-General of the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), Dr. Adebowale Adedokun, revealed this in an exclusive interview with Vanguard in Abuja.
“Debarment policy means if a contractor does a bad job, if a contractor fails to deliver quality work, that contractor can be blacklisted,” he said.
“Once a contractor who has collected government money refuses to do the job, does a bad job, or does not complete the job, we will recommend the blacklisting of that company—not only in Nigeria but internationally.”
He stressed that while erring contractors will be punished, those who deliver quality work will be encouraged, pointing to ongoing infrastructure works as examples of improved standards.
“Please take a ride to Lagos–Calabar; you will see quality jobs. Take a ride to Abuja–Kaduna–Kano; you will see good jobs. Take a look at the ongoing work between Mararaba and Keffi. Look at electricity; today, there is a lot of improvement,” he said.
“This is because everything they want to buy, every piece of equipment they want to procure, they must show us specifications.”
Looking ahead, he said the BPP will intensify support for local content and vulnerable groups in line with Tinubu’s Renewed Hope commitments.
“We are now going to enforce the Nigerian First policy as directed by Mr. President. We are going to introduce community-based procurement,” he announced. “And with all of this, the women affirmative procurement—these are new things that the President wants to unleash in procurement in the nation so that the youth, the women, and vulnerable groups will have certain projects given to them.”
He expressed optimism that these measures will stimulate rapid change and help tackle poverty.
“You will see a rapid, massive transformation in the way Nigerians do things and a reduction in poverty,” he said. “Let’s put Nigerian people first, and with that, we can collectively achieve the dream of a Nigeria that looks as good as Dubai.”
Adedokun disclosed that the agency saved the Federal Government about ₦1.1 trillion within one year by blocking inflated contract sums and enforcing tighter scrutiny of public projects under President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda.
He said his first priority upon assuming office “a little over a year ago” was to ensure that procurement no longer served as a bottleneck or a conduit for corruption but as an “enabler” of transparency and value for money.
“When I resumed, what I noticed was that the President had outlined a lot of initiatives under the Renewed Hope Agenda,” he explained. “The question that came to me was: how will I ensure full implementation of Mr. President’s Renewed Hope Agenda? The commonest thing was to make sure that procurement does not become a bottleneck.”
He said procurement had long been perceived as “a stumbling block” to governance, both at home and abroad—a perception he set out to change immediately.
“What we did was to make procurement an enabler, an instrument for transparency, accountability, and value for money,” he said. “I set out to make BPP a responsive agency that the President and his team can depend on for transparency and accountability, and to ensure that money allocated for government projects is properly accounted for by ensuring that we do not inflate contracts and we do not give contracts to the wrong contractors.”
To deliver on this mandate, the BPP DG said he created a dedicated Price Intelligence Unit to benchmark project costs and stop overpricing.
“One of the key things I did was to set up what I call the Price Intelligence Unit. This unit was primarily designed to benchmark the cost of projects,” he stated. “We started to ensure projects are benchmarked, prices are fair, not over-inflated, and also to make sure that contractors get value for their investment.”
According to him, this tighter scrutiny has produced huge fiscal gains. “In one single year, a total sum of ₦1.1 trillion has been saved,” he disclosed. “This is even outside other projects that we are still collating, just to give an idea of what Mr. President has done in procurement in the area of preventing corruption.”
Illustrating the impact, he explained how realistic pricing frees funds for additional projects. “If you are to build a hospital for ₦10 billion, because of the prevention mechanism Mr. President allowed us to introduce, we did benchmarking and found out that the hospital could not be ₦10 billion but probably ₦9 billion,” he said. “That ₦1 billion saved can now be used for other projects.”
He cited a paramilitary agency that was able to buy more vehicles after BPP reviewed its procurement request.
“Without the price intelligence prevention mechanism, they asked for 10 operational vehicles at a certain cost; that’s what they would have gotten,” he said.
“But because we applied the prevention mechanism—price intelligence—we were able to save some money. So rather than 10, they got 15.”
According to him, these are practical examples of “what it means to prevent corruption and ensure value for money.”
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