{"id":263875,"date":"2020-09-29T07:35:29","date_gmt":"2020-09-29T06:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/?p=263875"},"modified":"2020-09-29T07:35:33","modified_gmt":"2020-09-29T06:35:33","slug":"icpc-says-not-targeting-lawmakers-with-constituency-projects-tracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/?p=263875","title":{"rendered":"ICPC says not targeting lawmakers with Constituency Projects Tracking"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"ICPC<\/p>\n

The Chairman, Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences (ICPC), Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye, says its Constituency Projects Tracking is not targeted at lawmakers.<\/p>\n

Owasanoye disclosed this in Abuja on Monday at the 2nd National Summit on Diminishing Corruption in the Public Sector, which was organised in collaboration with the Office of the Secretary of the Government of the Federation.<\/p>\n

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that the constituency projects tracking, launched in 2019, is aimed at investigating fraudulent procedure practices in the award of contracts for constituency and executive projects.<\/p>\n

The projects tracking is also to make recoveries on projects or contracts confirmed to have been inflated or in which contractors under-performed or did not perform at all.<\/p>\n

According to the chairman, the commission introduced the constituency projects tracking initiative in 2019 and expanded its scope to include executive projects this year.<\/p>\n

He said the commission had special attention to track projects in agriculture, water resources, power, education and health.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe second phase of tracking covered 722 projects spread across 16 states.<\/p>\n

\u201dDue to COVID-19 and acute shortage of manpower, we used a threshold of N100 million for project selection.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means that we left out projects below N100 million value.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis decision produced the unintended consequence of concentration on projects of Senators and very few projects from the lower chamber.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will like to put it on record that we did not set out to target the lawmakers by this exercise,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n

He added that projects tracked at phase one were selected by the steering committee comprising Budget Office, Office of Accountant-General of the Federation, Bureau of Public Procurement, Media, CSOs and the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors.<\/p>\n

The chairman said the 2020 exercise revealed some improvement in project delivery but added that the commission was faced with many challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe discovered that a number of projects described in the budget as ongoing were new projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe discovered that projects are recommended for communities that do not need them. Such projects are abandoned, in spite of the huge sums appropriated for them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe discovered that projects were sited in private houses on private land thus appropriating common assets to personal use and totally denying communities expected to benefit,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The chairman said that the commission\u2019s effort had forced 59 contractors handling projects worth N2.25 billion, back to sites.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe list of affected projects is contained in the Interim Report for 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must also mention that we noted that some projects were very well done and met the value for money threshold. Such projects are also listed in the report.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have recovered and returned to beneficiaries assets worth about N700 million and cash of almost N200 million,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He, however, said that the commission would, in future, prosecute false description of projects as ongoing, in accordance with extant rules.<\/p>\n

NAN reports that the National Summit has the theme: \u201cTogether Against Corruption\u201d.<\/p>\n

NAN<\/p>\n

Vanguard News Nigeria<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chairman, Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences (ICPC), Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye, says its Constituency Projects Tracking is not targeted at lawmakers. Owasanoye disclosed this in Abuja on Monday at the 2nd National Summit on Diminishing Corruption in the Public Sector, which was organised in collaboration with the Office of the Secretary of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":263876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2830,3],"tags":[615,503,6422],"class_list":["post-263875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law","category-news","tag-icpc","tag-national-assembly","tag-senators"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=263875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/263876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=263875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=263875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=263875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}