Over 700 companies are jostling to win contracts awarded by the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) under its 2022 fiscal year.
Director of Procurement, Ben Iloanusi, disclosed during the opening of bids held at the NRC headquarters in Lagos that the firms have submitted bidding documents for the projects valued at over N12bn for 2022 railway projects.
Iloanusi explained that the NRC has not begun evaluation, authentication and validation as the opening was merely for verification of the documents submitted by the companies in accordance with the eligibility criteria put out in the adverts.
He said, “We are merely checking the documents. If the documents are complete, we tick. Some of these companies, if their documents are not complete, gives room for automatic disqualification at this point. However, we have not disqualified any company yet, because we just started checking the documents.”
Iloanusi stated further that the NRC, to improve the bidding process, conducted training for the desk officers handling the documents submitted, and have built a process and procedure document which the desk officers use as guide to clear any doubt.
Speaking earlier, the representative of the Managing Director of the NRC, Mr. Niyi Ali, who is the Director of Operations of the Corporation, said the corporation has made the process transparent in line with the procurement Act.
He said, “As you can see, we have adhered strictly to the 2007 Procurement Act as amended, and the bids are for capital projects like locomotive repairs, spare parts, civil works etc.
Ali added that the NRC would keep improving the bidding process annually.
He said, “Today, one of the things we have done better is that we have controlled access to the premises. We also have high teamed security personnel in attendance and all the necessary support agencies here to witness the process.”
As I said before, we are not evaluating, we are not validating, we are merely looking at the documents they submitted in accordance with the eligibility criteria in the advert. So all that they are doing here is checking that the documents are complete. We can disqualify if the documents are not there.
“The flaws we saw last year gave room for the guidelines this year. If we see any flaws this year, we will work on them in the coming year. So at the end of this year, we will look at lessons learnt and work on the bottlenecks.”
Earlier, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of NRC, Fredrick Okhiria, had said that a lot of bidders wanted to come through the back door.
