By Joseph Erunke

ABUJA-THE Public and Private Development Centre,PPDC,has decried the high rate of abandoned projects across the country, asking authorities to take actions towards completing them for effective use.

It regretted that public institutions were awarding contracts without following through their execution, leading to abandonment by contractors just as it said some awarded contracts were merely in pages of papers without physical trace. 

The organization particularly fingered the National Primary Health Care Agency,NPHCDA and the Universal Basic Education Commission,UBEC projects which it said,were abandoned.

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Speaking in Abuja, during a roundtable talk with officials of the two federal government agencies,PPDC’s Programme Officer, Onyekachi Chukwu,said after tracking awarded projects , the findings made through their community based monitors,CBM,was that over ten Primary Health Care,PHC projects were abandoned across 12 states. The same,he said “goes for UBEC.”

“In the year 2020, we had deployed what we call community based monitors to monitor UBEC and PHC projects which are schools and primary health centres

“The whole idea is to give the general public access to public procurement information so that people can know the kind of projects that have been awarded in their community. It is not just limited to UBEC and PHC, it is across all the public institutions”,he said.

Explaining that PPDC has being involved in project monitoring for over five years,Onyekachi decried the level at which contractors abandon projects, saying the development “calls for concern as it is a lose-lose situation on the part of the government and the beneficiary community.”

He also noted that there were situations of abandoned projects which have been left unattended to for over five years.

“Some of these projects have either been left halfway done as far back as 2015 or not even started in the first place.

“There are even multiple situations of awarded contracts not found in said communities or around the local government areas,”he lamented.

He added: “These projects, while some could not be found at all, some have dilapidated after completion without use while awaiting commissioning. Others were started and never completed. They are all in sorry states where the government and beneficiary community lose out completely as it is a situation of money spent without result.”

“An example of this is a N21 million awarded PHC contract in Plateau State which has been awarded since the year 2016. The project wasn’t there,having gone round the community and local government areas in the state,”he stated.

According to him,”The full report of this is available on the Budeshi portal.”

He also lamented that,”Some completed projects are not being put to use after many years of construction because they were awaiting commissioning thus resulting in the dilapidation of such projects.”

“In some cases, this abandoned project might be the only primary healthcare centre available in the whole community yet it will be left abandoned and uncompleted,”he said.

“There are instances where a project has been completely built since 2016, but then it’s not being used, simply because it is awaiting commissioning. The building had started detoriating,it has started collapsing and has been burgled,”he said.