Why most government projects fail – Panel

By DANIEL IDONOR

ABUJA—THE Presidential Projects Assessment Committee, PPAC, yesterday, blamed mass failure of public projects over the years to corruption, inadequate budgetary provision, poor project conceptualization and institutional mediocrity.

President Goodluck Jonathan had, March 4, 2010, inaugurated the 20-man PPAC to, among other things, take inventory of all on-going projects awarded by the Federal Government; assess the level of funding; and to physically inspect each projects to determine work done and to ascertain whether it is commensurate with the amount paid to the contractors.

Headed by a former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Engr. Ibrahim Bunu, the panel said the Federal Government, within the period under review lost billions of naira to dubious contractors and public officers.

Bunu in an address delivered at the presentation of the committee’s report to President Jonathan, said that the committee, in the course of its work, visited 200 sites of on-going projects across the country and physically assessed performance on the sites.

He said: “In the process, the committee has made an inventory of 11,886 on-going capital projects being executed by the Federal Government. The estimated cost implication of these projects stands at N7.78 trillion.”

He added that “out of this outstanding amount, N2, 696 trillion had been paid to contractors” leaving an outstanding of over N5 trillion.

In-depth  assessment

Bunu noted that following the committee’s in-depth assessment of many of the projects, we take no joy in confirming that there is indeed evidence of large scale, widespread institutional mediocrity, deficiency of vision and a lack of direction in project management, which result in poor conceptualization, poor design and faulty execution. Needless to add that this has resulted in avoidable loses of billions of naira to the government.”

He said the committee also confirmed the existence of inadequate budgetary allocation, high cost of financing projects and corruption “in the handling of projects by many self-seeking, inept public officers and contractors which has led to massive inflation of costs and undermined the legitimacy of their monitoring and supervision responsibilities.”

Bunu, however, lamented that the figure “represent the total responses received from ministries, departments and agencies, MDAs, of government, some of whom for reasons best known to them, failed to respond to the committee’s request for data on on-going projects.”

Noting that the figure represents an incomplete inventory; he said the correct figure may well be some 20 per cent higher. He added: “There are many uncompleted projects where trillion of naira has already been spent, and abandoned, prominent example of which is the 30 year old multi-billion dollar Ajaokuta Steel Company project. As at now $4.5 billion which have been spent lie wasted.

“Ajaokuta and the over 200 dams spread across the country not yet applied to their design objectives, are painful examples amongst many, to show that this country hardly realise value for money in many projects where governments has spent a lot of money. These we believe are issues the transformation agenda needs to address.”

The committee also advised government on the need to place emphasis on capacity building and on retraining and reorientation at all levels of government officials “as human capital is critical to the needed predisposition and eventual actualisation of the transformation agenda.”

The report is in two volumes of five parts. The first part is an inventory of all Federal Government projects, a compendium of interim reports prepared on individual high public profile projects and the third part is an up-to-date report on rates and cost of construction materials across the nation to serve a guide and standard for government officials, contractors and consultants.

Breakdown of the project as contained in the report showed that the FCT owed N3.1 trillion on 3,157 projects representing 34 per cent of the total amount of money.

Volume one of the report shows that of the geo-political zones, South-South zone had 1,755 projects amounting to N2.1 trillion followed by North Central zone with N630 billion with 1844 projects. The last in ranking is North East zone with 466 projects amounting to N98 billion.