Finally, the survey also revealed that expectations about the responses of others were too pessimistic. Many Nigerians are unaware that most people in their community agree that contract inflation and procurement fraud are negative practices. As part of the survey, participants were asked to consider 10 people in their community – such as family members, friends, neighbours and colleagues – and to state how many of them the respondent thought would accept embezzlement by procurement officials or contractors. As Figure 6 shows, on average, respondents thought that almost 4 out of 10 people in their community would say that such practices were acceptable (with averages of 3.9 out of 10 in the contract inflation and 3.5 out of 10 in the road contract case).
Changing social norms around procurement corruption
The survey findings suggest that critical opportunities exist for embedding new norms of anti-corruption and accountability in Nigerian public procurement – most notably, in tackling gaps in perception by facilitating dialogue among communities to show just how widespread opposition to corruption is. Further measures could include co-creating and sharing simplified public contracting technology and information at the community level to allow for greater citizen participation, such as public committees and commitment devices for monitoring contract delivery. Furthermore, to facilitate increased participation and investment in regulatory reforms among citizens, procurement data (including on contracts, tenders and bidding processes) also needs to be disclosed in a machine-readable format and made convenient for further processing and public scrutiny.
Critical opportunities exist for embedding new norms of anti-corruption and accountability in Nigerian public procurement – most notably, in tackling gaps in perception by facilitating dialogue among communities to show just how widespread opposition to corruption is.
Efforts at increasing transparency should be both public-facing and context-specific, with the objective of involving citizens in determining procurement priorities, bidding, evaluation and award processes, as well as providing complaints and review mechanisms. In an interview for the SNAG project, a public service reformer in Nigeria explained in simple terms the potential of technology in ensuring transparency and addressing the information asymmetry between government and the public:
Multi-stakeholder participation is often an infrequent afterthought in Nigeria’s procurement system, for both large and small contracts. For instance, the construction of the 700-km, $11 billion Lagos–Calabar coastal highway is a recent example of the opacity, conflicts of interests and lack of transparency or multi-stakeholder engagement in Nigeria’s broken procurement system. Efforts to address dysfunction, opacity and corruption must involve the mandating and enforcement of public scrutiny, and the ability of oversight mechanisms to investigate public complaints.
Disclosure measures such as the establishment of a public register of the real beneficial owners of Nigerian firms (for example, the Persons with Significant Control (PSC) Register, which became publicly available in May 2023) can also be powerful tools for engaging communities in greater public accountability. Such measures would breach the powerful opacity of hidden forms of high-level corruption like embezzlement, and could further entrench resistance to procurement corruption, particularly at local levels where procurement officials and contractors alike are embedded in communities and thus potentially sensitive to changes in social pressures and expectations.
But even if popular opinion can be shifted, available tools and processes for oversight and enforcement would need to be used effectively by the public, procurement regulators and law enforcement, which entails significant investment in training and capacity-building. Cases would need to be adjudicated swiftly and independently – in other words, social pressure would need to be backed by material consequences.
