The Concerned Contractors Owed by the Federal Government of Nigeria for the 2024 Capital Projects have narrated how they were being frustrated by bureaucratic bottlenecks in the federal civil service while processing their certificates due for payment.
Convener of the group, Jackson Ifeanyi Nwosu, who was guest on Arise News Night on Monday, narrated the trauma they were sometimes subjected to in processing their payments as they were often sent back and forth from one ministry to another as well as the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.
Nwosu noted the risks some of the contractors faced in the course of executing these projects with some contractors endangering their lives to travel to Damboa in Borno State, the hotbed of Boko Haram insurgency to work.
Newsmata.com.ng recalls that scores of local contractors on Monday took to the streets in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, in a peaceful protest over the humongous debts owed them by the federal government since over nine months ago, appealing to President Bola Tinubu and the National Assembly to urgently intervene and facilitate payment for projects they completed.
During the protest which took the aggrieved contractors to the headquarters of the Federal Ministry of Finance, they expressed deep frustration over what they described as prolonged indebtedness that had been inflicting economic hardship on them and their families, such that some of them have died.
Brandishing placards bearing inscriptions such as “We delivered our projects, now pay us our money”; “You are killing small businesses, pay what you owe”; and “Central payment system by OAGF and FMF has failed woefully. Revert back to the former system,” among others, the contractors warned that continued delay in payment could push many of them into desperate situations, especially given the prevailing economic and security challenges in the country.
However, speaking on their plight on Arise News Night, Nwosu, who could not give the total sum owed the contractors, put his own outstanding payment since November last year at over N300 million.
According to him, “Like we did projects of solar installations, we did projects of roads – road rehabilitations. We did projects of renovation of schools. And there are certain contractors also that did projects in Borno, with the risk. They went to Damboa, those areas, to take risks. What if they had died? Some of our contractors have died as we speak today, due to non-payment of contractors by the federal government.
Explaining why they are in dire strait, Nwosu noted that “as a contractor, you can’t have all the money. You might be dealing with three, four, five Ministries. Your money might be trapped in one of them. So, what you now do is, you need to get money from a financial institution or most of these private lenders to fund your projects expecting that in the next four weeks to eight weeks, you know, after your invoices have been submitted, that you will get paid.
“At the end of the day, disappointments; at the end of the day, when you get to the accountant general of the Federation, they will tell you go to the Ministry of Finance; when you get to ministry of finance, they will tell you go to CBN. You get to CBN, they will send you back to the Federal Ministry of Finance. We are tired”.
On the efforts they had made to get government’s attention, Nwosu said, “We’ve written to Federal Ministry of Finance, copied Mr. President, copied the Senate Committee on Appropriation, Senate Committee on Finance, and Senate Committee on Public Petitions. We’ve written to them.
“Whenever you approach them, they will tell you they are in a meeting. And when the Nigerian government starts to tell you about meetings, meetings, meetings, you should know that that meeting is to buy more time. There is no concrete answer. They only talked about it after Seriake Dickson (Senator representing Bayelsa West) came up with the issue at the National Assembly. You will see in a few days to come now they will come again and say they are working on it. Are they going to work on it till we die?”
Throwing light on the issues they have with the central payment system, Nwosu said it had to do with the delay in payment.
He complained that “The ministry or MDAs, they will tell you they’ve done cash plan after the 15th of each month, you can’t do cash plan again till the next month, which is a delay.
“Then, when the ministry sends the cash plan to the Accountant General of the Federation, the accountant general in turn will now send a cash backing to the ministry. As I speak to you now, they’ve stopped the cash plan as at 15th of this June. No more cash plan.
“As a contractor, when we finish our jobs, we send our invoices to the ministry for job completion certificates and so on. The ministry in turn processes these stuffs and sends it to the accountant general of the federation. The accountant general of the federation will now come up with the cash backing to be able to put them in the next payments roll. All this has been done, some of us, since November. The bottleneck is too much”.