Consultancy for railways – The Nation Posted by: The Citizen in Public Affairs 10 hours ago A report on the huge consultancy fees on on-going railway rehabilitation projects has merely highlighted another scourge of public procurement, which although less spoken of, is no less a source of undelivered value for ill-served citizens. We refer to the humongous fees charged by local and foreign consultants, either for no discernable services at all, or, for services whose utility are at best dubious. It is not for nothing that citizens’ expectations from the on-going modernisation of the railway sector have heightened in recent years. Since 1999, allocation of funds to the sector has grown significantly, with much of this coming by way of loans from the Chinese government. The sector comes second only to the power sector on the government’s oft-stated priority; it stems from what the government has long acknowledged as its promise, not only as a vehicle for transforming the economy, but also the critical wheel without which the economy cannot turn optimally. Considered against the amount poured into the sector in the last 14 years under the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) administration, the government’s claims of progress would obviously come across as a sham, entirely disappointing. And the reasons for this are as many as they are varied. These include paucity of funds – it explains why vital investment decisions are put on hold, leading to cost overruns; the dearth of technical capacity which also serves to explain the absence of a discernable roadmap, hence the flip-flop policies by successive administrations; not least is the pervasive factor of corruption by officials who have come to see railway development as avenue to corner their own gravy. This is the context in which we view the slew of contracts for feasibility studies, all of which run into billions of naira, being awarded by the Federal Government for rail development. At the last count, these projects, spread across the six geopolitical zones, number nearly a score. Just as some of the proposed rail lines appear futuristic – and we see nothing wrong with that – the truth however is that most of the projects are as impracticable or outlandish even by Nigeria’s interminable standards of long term. It ought to bother every Nigerian that a Federal Government whose record at so-called modernisation of the old narrow gauge is at best a sham (and which went to China barely two months ago to shop for loans to complete the Abuja-Kaduna rail line) has since turned hyperactive in commissioning feasibility studies for new projects. With all due respect, it seems to us a case of misplaced priority. We would have thought that a better way to go is to concentrate on developing those lines long accepted as being of utmost priority, as against fishing for new avenues to dissipate scarce national resources. We must also add that some of the contracts look more to us like schemes to fleece the treasury – or better still, job for the boys. As for the foreign consultancies, the nation has just enough of unpleasant tales to tell from its experiences of the heady days of jumbo loans of the ‘80s when corrupt officials, acting in concert with their foreign collaborators, creamed off a significant portion of the loans meant for specific projects via the mechanism of “consultancy services”. It is bad enough that the nation is slipping determinedly back into debts; it would be most tragic to add the open licence of another cycle of free-for-all consultancy services of dubious value to the ails afflicting the economy. Seems about time the appropriate committees of the National Assembly stepped in, first, to determine whether or not Nigerians have the benefit of value for the contracts already awarded, and second, to halt further bleeding of the national till through schemes that are self-serving, as they are needless.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 20:05:00 +0000
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