By Chris Ochayi, Abuja

The Quantity Surveyor Registration Board of Nigeria, QSRBN, has called on the Economic and Financial Crime Commission, EFCC, and the Independent Corrupt practices and other related offences Commission, ICPC, to urgently set up Project Cost Auditing and Monitoring departments in order to curb corrupt practices in the award of government projects.

President of QSRBN, Mallam Husaini Dikko who made the call in Abuja, at the just concluded 1st National Project Cost Reduction Summit organised by the Board, argued that the unit, if created would enable the anti-graft agencies to be effective in executing their statutory mandate.

Mallam Dikko while speaking at the summit with theme: “Achieving Value-for-Money in the development of Public Infrastructure in Nigeria”, said cost auditing must be embraced by the government because it is a critical leg in the public procurement value chain.

“This shall not only apply to Federal Government projects but also to projects executed by State Governments where the level of cost inflation is relatively higher”, he said.

“It is the position of the QSRBN that value for money should be a central issue in our public expenditure policy. Cost auditing is the only way of determining whether “value-for-money has been achieved in the development of public infrastructure in Nigeria. Nigeria must therefore embrace Cost Auditing as a critical leg in the public procurement value chain,” the QSRBN president said.

“The QSRBN is ready to partner with these Institutions in an inter-agency collaboration to set up these departments,” he said, adding that a nexus exists between the scale of corruption and the rate of economic growth and development within a given society.

“It, is said that the high rate of economic growth and development going on in China at the moment is attributable to their hard stand on corruption in contra-distinction to what we see in some ‘Banana Republics’ all over the world especially in developing countries.

“Corruption is a major cause of high project cost in Nigeria. Poor attitude to work; lack of planning, poor time management and laziness also lead to high project cost. High costs can also come about as a result of incompetence, quackery, poor training and lack of executive capacity. Of all possible culprits, the most damning is the “Nigerian Factor” which simply put is “lack of patriotism” on the part of Nigerian actors from the followership to the leadership.

“The Nigerian factor is the prism through which you can locate corruption, graft, incompetence, poor attitude to work, lack of accountability,” he lamented.