Authorities of the Armed Forces of Nigeria are set to improve the military equipment procurement procedures that had hitherto caused failures and poor accountability in the acquisition of heavy military weapons and platforms.
In a procurement seminar organized by the Defence Headquarters in Abuja, the authorities hope to totally overhaul and realign their hardware acquisition processes and make them completely transparent in accordance with the present administration’s policy thrust.
Declaring the seminar open, the Chief of Defence Staff, General Gabriel Abayomi Olonisakin said that the AFN will always remain a representative example of moral correctness in the management of public funds. He said that the outcome of the seminar would go a long way to serve as a veritable tool for assessing the hardware needs of the military and their procurement capacities while harmonizing them with the earlier proposed guidelines of the ministry of defence which is the supervising ministry of the armed forces.
Themed, ‘Capability Management of the Armed Forces of Nigeria through an Integrated Procurement System’, the Chief of Defence Staff said the seminar would ensure that the operational requirements of the military would always be assessed with what the end users need.
“The theme derives its focus from global best practices where urgent operational requirements are matched with needs assessed from end users”, he said.
To achieve the desired goal, two lecture papers were presented by credible resource fellows both of whom agreed that if an organization adopts wrong procurement methods, needs assessment would be low, the capacity of the armed forces would reduce, and an outright failure would follow sooth.
The acting Director General, Bureau for Public Procurement, Engineer Ahmed Abdul delivered the first paper titled “Public procurement act: effective tool for delivering for less”, while a retired senior Air Force officer, Air Commodore Babatunde Akanbi delivered the second paper on “salient issues and guidelines in Defence equipment procurement”.
