Abstract
Nigeria has made enormous revenues from the sale of crude oil as its monolithic product to the world yet it has made little advance in terms of infrastructure, quality of life and human development of her citizens. This has been attributed to endemic levels of corruption through misappropriation of public funds for private use, most of which have been associated with public procurement. By the instrumentality of World Bank Country Assessment Report (CPAR) 1999, the Public Procurement Act of 2007 was enacted at the Federal level with most of the Nigerian States following suit, chief amongst which is Rivers State. This paper examined most of the provisions of the Public Procurement Act of 2007 for the Federal Government viz-a-vis Rivers State Public Procurement Law, No. 8 of 2008 respectively, so as to show the practice and expectation of the public procurement legal regime both at federal and state levels; the impact, and possible challenges of the implementation of public procurement laws in Nigeria. The Paper identified that Nigeria has to an extent, good public procurement laws but is faced with implementation constraints that present themselves in knowledge deficiency of government officials in public procurement practice, corruption, political interferences, general misconception by government officials that public procurement regulation is a departmental process rather than as governance tool for the development of the country, amongst others. The paper concluded that although Public Procurement laws have had some impact in Nigeria’s government contracting process, the regime has not fully been embedded or achieved its goals. In order to fully achieve the aims of the Procurement legal regime in the country, the paper recommended the establishment, development of body of knowledge and institutional teaching/training of public procurement courses in Tertiary institutions in collaboration with Bureaus of Public Procurement; compulsory human capacity training for existing affected public officers; the activation of Bureau’s auditing powers on procuring entities; the expansion of powers of the Bureaus to include prosecution of persons engage in public procurement malpractice(s) and the increase of penalties for effective deterrence, amongst others.
Keywords: Procurement, Public Procurement, Legal Regime, Government Contracting Process.