I have always believed that Nigeria's problem is largely that of fuzzy accounts (a government official, president, governor, local government chairman should not see any cash not part of his salary).

Quote: "Contract transparency is starting to catch on. Colombia's e-procurement website already regularly publishes the full contract for procured goods and services, along with contract amendments and extensions and a range of other documents from the procurement process to final evaluation. By 2008, five years after its launch, the site was getting nearly 5.5 million visitors a year. And Colombia is not alone: A number of state governments in Australia have a similar system in place, and Florida's Miami-Dade County sometimes publishes full contracts on its own procurement website."

[size=14pt]Is any candidate for Nigeria's upcoming elections willing to sign on to the above?[/size]

Private contractors cost taxpayers worldwide untold billions in corruption, inefficiency, and mismanagement. But the solution isn't getting rid of them -- it's showing the rest of us their paperwork.
BY CHARLES KENNY | DECEMBER 20, 2010


On Dec. 7, Nigerian authorities filed charges against former officials of Halliburton -- including one Richard Cheney -- for their involvement in a 10-year, $182 million cash-for-contracts scandal related to the construction of a power plant in southern Nigeria. The charges were ultimately dropped, but only after Halliburton agreed to pay $250 million -- and that's in addition to the $177 million Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR have already paid to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges surrounding the same deal.

In defense of Halliburton, they're hardly the only contractors playing in legal gray areas -- you don't even have to move out of the infrastructure sector to find other examples. Enron was widely accused of wrongdoing in connection with the construction of the Dabhol power plant in India, a project that produced electricity at a cost four times higher than local producers. Meanwhile, Siemens paid $1.6 billion in fines to U.S. and European regulators to settle charges that it used bribes to secure public-works contracts around the world. Local companies also get in on the act. Surveys of Afghan firms suggest bribes to obtain government contracts are equal to an average of 3 percent of the total contract value -- in the Philippines, that figure is 10 percent. All that weak governance can have a big impact on prices and quality -- road rehabilitation financed by the World Bank, for instance, costs 50 percent more in countries where the average contract bribe size is above 2 percent than in less corrupt countries.

And even relatively clean countries have plenty of problems with contracting. The U.S. government's are legendary -- everyone's heard of the Pentagon's $640 toilet seats and $20 plastic ice-cube trays. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security ended up paying contractors $2,480 a house to cover damaged roofs with blue tarps -- a job that should have cost closer to $300 per roof. A congressional report from 2006 summarizing evidence from government auditors and elsewhere suggested that contracts with a total value of $745 billion had "experienced significant overcharges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement over the last five years."

Corruption isn't the only explanation for why contracting goes awry. Even relatively clean governments are hardly models of efficiency, and private competition can often deliver better for less. The problem is transparency. When a government contracts out work, the distance between the people delivering the services and the ultimate customer -- the taxpayer -- grows. Contractors have little incentive to save the rest of us money, and our ability to make sure they're doing it is too limited. If a contract is failing, it may well remain a secret between one or two bureaucrats and the company concerned. Government audit agencies might uncover a problem if they are alerted or perform a random investigation. But the rest of us can't hold contractors (or the officials who hired them) to account if we don't even know what's meant to be delivered.

There's an answer to these problems: Publish the contract. That would allow citizens, watchdog groups, even competing firms to see whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth. It would also considerably reduce the legal costs of contracting (because we wouldn't continually have to reinvent the wheel when it came to writing contracts in the first place) and allow the spread of better contracting practices.

Contract transparency is starting to catch on. Colombia's e-procurement website already regularly publishes the full contract for procured goods and services, along with contract amendments and extensions and a range of other documents from the procurement process to final evaluation. By 2008, five years after its launch, the site was getting nearly 5.5 million visitors a year. And Colombia is not alone: A number of state governments in Australia have a similar system in place, and Florida's Miami-Dade County sometimes publishes full contracts on its own procurement website.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/12/20/publish_or_perish

Freedom of information exists in Columbia, but not in Nigeria. So how do you expect to have contract transparency when the government refuses to reveal even details on how the annual budget is spent. All you still get is a non detailed review that you know is full of crock but you don't have access to real data to prove it is.