THE FUTURE IS OPEN: BREAKING BORDERS WITH OPEN CONTRACTING
Governance in the 21st century thrives on openness, transparency and accessibility as citizens increasingly demand for accountability in public stewardship. Consequently, governments are increasingly realizing the importance of meeting these demands in renewing their legitimacy and in fulfilling the social contract. The absence of openness in governance increases a proclivity for corruption and high-handedness in the public service.
According to the Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Angel Gurria, ‘an open government is transparent, accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere; and responsive to new ideas and demands’. As a requirement for good governance, open government is about providing citizens access to documents and proceedings of government, including ‘open contracting’, for effective public oversight. It is about publishing and using open, accessible and timely information on government contracting to engage citizens and businesses in identifying and fixing problems. Its primary objective is to achieve efficiency in public service delivery by curtailing corruption in public procurement. For instance, between 60 to 75 percent of corruption cases in Nigeria, are procurement related .
Open contracting leverages on strong political will and effective legal frameworks and monitoring systems. The principal legal frameworks for open contracting in Nigeria are: The Public Procurement Act (PPA) 2007 which empowers the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP); the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act 2011, and Section 15(5) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
The standardization of public procurement data is also a crucial requirement for its success. This is because the open data serve as the main instrument for tracking, analyzing and reporting on the contracting processes of public agencies. To serve its purpose, data collection must be structured in ways that capture the entire contracting cycle.
The civil society plays critical roles in entrenching the principles of open contracting through monitoring and actively participating in reform processes. For instance, four (4) out of the 32 European countries examined on Corruption Risk Assessment in Public Procurement, were made significant progress owing to the contributions of civil society to procurement reforms (Messick and Gawthorpe, 2017).
In Nigeria, a number of civil society groups including the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), Advocacy Nigeria, 21st Century, African Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Almareefa Foundation, among others, are actively involved in promoting open contracting. Among these efforts, the ‘Budeshi’ project bankrolled by the PPDC, is worth mentioning.
Budeshi which means ‘open it’ in the Hausa language, is aimed at exposing the processes of public service delivery to public scrutiny. The project promotes open contracting by requiring that data from budget to procurement are structured and their various stages linked to the intended public service delivery. Using the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), the PPDC has recorded significant success by providing a single platform for obtaining information on public contracts across the 36 States of Nigeria.
Innovations as these enable Nigerians to monitor government contracts and their implementation with ease, and as such demand accountability while compelling contractors to deliver quality and timeliness.
Open contracting, therefore, serves as a veritable instrument in curtailing corruption and promoting effectiveness in public service and the extent to which it succeeds depends largely on the active participation of civil society groups.
