Nigeria’s Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babangida Fashola, says there is no fraud in the processes for the award of contracts in his ministry.
He made this known on Thursday when he appeared before the House of Representatives panel investigating alleged infractions in two contracts awarded by the ministry.
The House had mandated its committees on power and public procurement to investigate the fraudulent award of contracts amounting to N42 billion on rural electrification scheme in some federal universities.
The minister said that in the first place there existed no contract amounting to N42 billion for rural electrification scheme.
But he said the federal executive council approved N38.9 billion for the same project with a paltry budgetary allocation of N9billion by the National Assembly from the N20billion the ministry requested for.
Fashola said under the procurement Act the ministry was obliged to pay 15 per cent of what was awarded from the N9 billion appropriated, stressing that, 9 Universities and 8 Teaching Hospitals were to benefit from the pilot project which also has the Nigeria Universities Commission, NUC, and the university Vice chancellors as critical stakeholders who were similarly carried along.
He noted that six International power firms, which included, General Electric, GE, Siemens, Sterling Wilson were technically selected by the Ministry upon approval by the Bureau of public procurement to do the selective bidding.
Two companies finally won the bids while the project was broken into 9 components, after it got BPP’s certificate of no objection which was also approved by FEC on December 20, 2017.
