A Kwara-based Civil Society Organization, Elites Network for Sustainable Development (ENetSUD) has revealed that the supervising Ministry of Works inflated the contract sum of Ilesha-Baruba-Gwanara road with the sum of N751,551,647:22.
This was contained in a letter dated November 10, signed by its Coordinator, Dr. Alagbonsi Abdullateef, and submitted to Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq.
The letter reads partly, “As part of ENetSuD’s thoroughness in subjecting an approved BEME to preliminary examination to crosscheck the contract sum even before vising the project site, we discovered that the approved BEME for the project (which was made available to us by your Focal Person, SSA Monitoring and Evaluation) is grossly incorrect as the contract sum has been inflated by Seven Hundred and Fifty-One Million, Five Hundred and Fifty-One Thousand, Six Hundred and Forty-Seven Naira, Twenty-Two kobo (N751,551,647:22). This means that the correct contract sum as per the quantity and rates approved in the BEME for all the items is supposed to be Two Billion, Two Hundred and Ninety-Six Million, Five Hundred and Seventy-Seven Thousand, Seven Hundred Naira, Twenty-Eight kobo (N2,296,577,700.28).”
The CSO urged the Governor to ensure the re-consideration of the project BEME and re-approval of the correct contract sum (N2,296,577,700.28) by the State Executive Coincil, adding that the excess of N751,551,647:22 should be used for other priority project in the State.
Recall that the project was inherited by the present administration from the past administration. The road contract was originally awarded in 2013 and was subsequently reviewed in 2015, 2017 and again in May 2019 just before the coming of the incumbent administration.
The present administration re-negotiated the initially-planned surface-dressed road from N2,782,716,900.95 approved by the past administration and added N265,412,446.50 to make it an asphalt road, arriving at the total contract sum of N3,048,129,347.50 approved by the AbdulRahman-led State Executive Council (SEC) in its virtual meeting dated 7th August, 2020, according to the statement signed by the Honourable Commissioner for Communications.
The Ilesha Baruba – Gwanara road is among the six (6) projects in the first cohort that ENetSuD is evaluating through the #KwaraSocialAudit proposed by the AbdulRahman-led administration, which has ENetSuD as the first CSO that is executing it.