The Senate Committee Chairman on Works, Senator Kabiru Gaya, has deplored the negative effects of the due process act on governance at the Federal level in the country. Gaya blamed the act for the bureaucratic bottlenecks experienced in the execution of projects due to the requirements of the act.
The lawmaker particularly deplored the act for allegedly frustrating the various efforts being made to revamp and rehabilitate the country’s infrastructure, especially the roads, which he noted were still in very bad shape.
Speaking with our correspondent in an exclusive chat in Abuja, he stressed that the act had been preventing those charged with the responsibility of overseeing the execution of the various projects, including the ministers, from carrying out their duties.
Gaya said, “As chairman of Works Committee, I am not happy with what is happening. The roads are terribly bad. Why I say I am not happy is that up until now, we are still on this due process of tendering.
It takes six months to tender a project. It is too bad. The bureaucracy arrangement is wrong. It (the Act) wasn’t passed by us. We even asked for the reviewed Act. But that has not been signed by President Muhammadu Buhari.
We expect that, that should be signed. “When a president swears in a minister, the minister is given the responsibility to act on behalf of the president in that ministry. And then a permanent secretary is also sworn-in or appointed as the accounting officer. But all these people are now subjected to a junior officer who is in charge of due process, who decides who gets the job.
“I mean, it is not fair. When the President gives his power to the ministers, let the ministries do their own procurement within the ministry. Let the ministry have access.
That is why you find that when the ministries are doing their due process thing, you hardly find any permanent secretary being involved because he is not part of the system.” Our correspondent gathered that these cadre of junior workers cash in on the provisions of the Public Procurement Act 2007 to frustrate the execution of projects meant to provide the dividends of democracy to the people
