By Mashe Umaru Gwamna
The President of Nigeria Institute of Quantity Surveyors(NIQS),Olayemi Shonubi, has expressed concern over corruption in the execution of constituency projects
Shonubi made the disclosure during quarterly interactive forum organized by the Property and Environment Writers’ Association of Nigeria (PEWAN) in Lagos, yesterday.
He asked for specific Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) to track and warehouse constituency projects in order to reduce leakages.
He claimed that many public procurements for constituency projects, were tainted by corruption and irregularities.
He said several constituency projects awarded were made to look like conduit, where funds were being siphoned because they were either non- existent or sited far from where they were financed.
There should be a specific MDA where these projects should be warehoused, that is the way we can get value,” he added.
He said reports from the project tracking organised by the ICPC, in conjunction with NIQS and some CSOs, showed that “our public-funded projects are still enmeshed in corruption”.
“In a situation where MDAs undertake projects outside their areas of operation leaves room for a lot of underhand deals aside from further increasing the administrative costs of running such projects.
There is the need for procurements for constituency projects to be warehoused under a specific MDA for effective monitoring and supervision,” he added.
He lamented the low engagement of quantity surveyors in government and projects, adding that quantity surveyors helped to curb wastage, reduce cost of projects and eliminate corruption.
He decried the trend in the built environment, where engineers had hijacked the roles of quantity surveyors, thereby creating a vacuum in accurate quantities delivering.
Shonubi explained that it was only in Nigeria that the Bill of Engineering Measurement Evaluation was used in contract awards instead of Bill of Quantity, which only quantity surveyors could use to bring down the cost of projects.
He said the trend was difficult to correct because “once you have something that has become a norm it takes time to change”.
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