Moving Nigeria’s Project Procurement System to Best Value: A Prescription

Abstract

A new sustainable and best value procurement initiative suitable for use in developing countries has been developed.  The procurement system, the Performance Information Procurement System (PIPS) was developed in the United States (US), and has been tested in Botswana and recently in India.  PIPS not only stabilizes the procurement system, it transfers the risk and control to contractors who must act in the best interest of the client.  The transparency, accountability, and risk management orientation of the PIPS structure disengages relationships, inaccurate expectations, and bureaucratic and political actions.  The strength of PIPS includes minimizing the need for professionals representing the client to make decisions, direct, and control contractors.  PIPS has been tested for 20 years in the US, with 98% performance on over 600 projects.  Recent tests outside of construction reveal that the efficiency of PIPS can minimize up to 50% of the procurement transaction costs. We hypothesized that paradigm shift from the low-bid or price-based procurement to the best value procurement through the application of PIPS technology is a potential panacea capable of extricating corruption, collusion, fraud, bid rigging, ethical violations and negative headlines from developing countries’ procurement environment rather than advancing measures that only scratches the problems on the surface. We infer that a adoption of a new initiative in best value procurement using PIPS technology can revolutionize the procurement environment in Nigeria in particular and the developing countries as a whole.

Keywords: Best value, public project procurement, Performance Information Procurement System (PIPS), sustainable consumption, developing countries, Nigeria.