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What is due
from the �Due Process� office?
By Mike
Ikhariale
[email protected]
Of late, there
has been so much talk about the role of the �Due Process� office. Everyone
seems to have one or too unpleasant stories to tell about it. Stripped of
all jargons, the office was established with a view to making sure that
government contracts and procurements are awarded at prices that have some
meaningful relationship with their actual value. This is because it has
become well-known that corruption in Nigeria is primarily executed through
the practice of reckless over-pricing of the goods and services that
governments procure and that a huge chunk of the nation�s annual budgetary
allocations go into such over-priced payments or, in extreme cases,
payments without rendering any service in return.
The establishment of an office
like that of �Due Process� in the country was a part of the overall
�reform� package that the World Bank has handed down to governments with
tottering economies urgently in need of rescue from bankruptcy. We really
did not have any choice about establishing an office like what we have now
nicknamed �Due Process�. By the way, it is largely a misnomer to call it
�due process� because in strict juristic construction, the notion of �due
process� has meaning mainly in the context of procedural justice as
against substantive justice, namely, fair hearing. But it is very possible
for a process to fully comply with the requirements of technical due
process and still manages to inflict serious injustice if the substantive
rules are themselves unjust. Complying strictly with bad rules and inhuman
regulations may indeed amount to perpetuating injustices in the name of
�due process�. The Nazists of Hitler�s Germany were complying strictly
with the laws and processes of the regime which were, in all material
respects, unjust. Due process, for it to be of any value must be carried
out in the context of justice and fairness as against deliberate rigidity
or manifest bias.
All the same, the idea that
the Due Process office represents is quite different from that known to
lawyers and it is one that ought to be applauded in view of what it has
become. Quite frankly, I think an office that does what the Due Process
people are doing right now is an institutional imperative for the Obasanjo
regime which has made transparency and probity the cardinal strand of his
administration. For too long, the nation has been bled badly by the
indiscriminate award of contracts at costs that are totally unrelated to
their true worth. So pervasive was this practice that it became the norm
that government projects became better expressed in terms of the amount to
be expended on them instead of the result expected from the expenditure.
That is how we started hearing of a �N40 billion hospital� without telling
the nation if the hospital is a �10-bed� type or a �100-bed� type. And it
was alright that a huge figure has been placed on it and that the money
would be paid out, not minding if an hospital would really be built or if
built, whether it would be worth that amount.
It is quite expected that for
a country in which over-pricing has become the norm, an office like that
of Due Process would be fiercely resisted by those who favoured the
status quo
in which the nation�s resources were routinely frittered away. I am
therefore not surprised that so much noise are being made these days about
the negative roles of that office in the process of government
contracting. Properly understood, the Due Process office was meant to slow
down on the speed at which government funds are disbursed; it is a form of
quality control on the cash flow process of the government. But critics
are saying that beyond the need to ensure that the nation gets value for
her money in government contracts,
Due Process has unfortunately become an obstacle to timely,
effective and efficient government business. That would really be
unfortunate.
The first problem with the office
is that of perception by both the operatives and the public. The
operatives seem to have been afflicted by the �OBJ Disease� which analysts
have since diagnosed as �too know� or, in local parlance,
over-sabi.
I have seen snippets of TV interviews in which the boss of Due Process
spoke as if every Nigerian is a thief and she alone is the saint. If I may
borrow a phrase from the discipline of auditing, instead of seeing her job
as that of a watchdog, she erroneously sees it as that of a bloodhound,
hunting down fraudsters all the way. Checking others� works to ensure that
they conform to set standards does not translates to making the one doing
the checking to see all others as crooks or proceed with so much bad faith
that every effort would, a fortiori, be concluded as bad even
before taking a look at them. That way, people would become antagonistic
instead of being cooperative. A situation in which more than fifty percent
of the capital projects of the federation are held up at the office of Due
Process, several months after their submission, is an indication that the
office has misread its functions.
It is very possible that
ministries and government departments may not be familiar with the
procedures and requirements of the office. What a creative agency would
have done in the circumstance is to call on all the offices concerned and
educate them on what is it that is required of them instead of stalling
and holding on to their contract papers in the manner of a bureaucratic
ambush. Now, rather being a diligent watchdog over public funds, the
office may have unwittingly become a real clog in the wheel of progress.
Government is about service but that is certainly not the case when
everything is held up because of �Due Process�. The bottomline is that the
operatives are either not sufficiently inducted into what government is
all about or they are actually sabotaging real development. Here, the head
of Due Process may need to move away from her abstract, classroom ideas
about government to the concrete realities of effective government on the
ground.
The other problem with Due Process is the actual and
perceived double standards in its so-called contract verification
functions. For example, Nigerians are eager to know what was the input of
the Due Process office in the purchase of presidential aircrafts which
critics say have price tags that are quite at variance with what should
normally be the case. Of course, Nigerians were shocked to read some weeks
ago a report in the Sunday Sun tabloid which revealed a very
serious abuse of due process by the Finance Minister, Okonjo-Iweala,
alias, �Madam Due Process�. The report, so far not denied, was that the
minister awarded a contract running into millions of naira to one of her
relations without recourse to laid-down procedures. It would be
interesting to know the input of the Due Process office in that deal.
They way things are going
today, there is the real fear that, if care is not taken, rather than
being an anti-corruption devise, the Due Process office could itself
become one of the numerous corruption outlets in Nigeria (just like the
police has become) by unlawfully demanding �wetin you carry� from
ministries and departments seeking for its speedy certification. All it
takes to do that is to unnecessarily hold on to contact documents in the
pretext of verification and anxious departments would then have to �do
something� for their files to �pass�. Then, Due Process would have become
an �Undue Process� needing verification itself. All said, I would
personally wish the office succeed in its declared mission and, in fact,
that all the states and local governments of the federation adopt the due
process system in their
procurement activities so as to minimise on the present colossal wastes
effected through over-pricing
of government contracts.
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