It has been revealed that about 274 projects, valued at N13.97 billion, awarded by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) in 2019 were fully paid for but not executed.
This revelation was made by the director Planning and Policy Coordination of the Ministry, Zubairu Abdullahi at an interactive meeting on project monitoring and evaluation organised by the ministry in Abuja.
In his power point presentation at the meeting, Abdullahi said that there were cases of contracts awarded for the supply of various agricultural and agro processing inputs and equipment that were yet to be executed but had been duly certified and paid for. While in some other cases contracts were fully paid for but the contractor was yet to complete the project.
According to him, “There were cases of contracts accepted when specifications were not met, example is the one inch water pumps wrongly received at Keffi store instead of three inches water pump. There were also cases of SRV’s issued to some contractors which the items were yet to be supplied contrary to section 37 of the provisions of the Public Procurement Act and financial regulations as well as cases of substandard materials used in projects execution in some states.”
Abdullahi who provided pictures of some of the poorly executed projects said there were also cases of some contractors conniving with corrupt officials of the ministry to over report project execution and forging of documents to secure payment.
He observed that 2019 actually marked a serious improvement in project execution in the ministry, noting that of a total of 1323 projects the ministry handled last year, 831 (63 per cent) have been completed at the cost of N38.05 billion; 217 (16 per cent) valued at N13.45 billion are ongoing.
He said that part of the measures the ministry has taken to check the illegal activities of contractors include the adoption of e-monitoring of projects in the field using android phones to authenticate reports coming from states; activation of Global Positioning System (GPS) during monitoring to give exact information/location of projects and the collected data sent almost immediately to the central server in the Planning and Policy Coordination Department (P&PC) at the headquarters.
He said the department also periodically engage non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the states to monitor and report the execution of projects.