Mohammed Bougei Attah has outdone himself. His latest article in Premium News is a glittering monument to confident wrongness, a parade of half-baked assertions wrapped in a smugness so thick it could choke a Camel.
What Attah has offered is not analysis. It is a masterclass in misinterpretation, selective reading, self-delusion, and intellectual posturing that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
Let us start from where all serious conversations must begin: the law. And let us not mince words.
● The Law speaks loud and clear
Attah’s core claim, that the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) has no mandate to train or certify practitioners, is not just wrong. It is aggressively wrong. The Public Procurement Act (PPA) 2007, which established the BPP, leaves no room for the delusions he continues to peddle.
For the avoidance of doubt: Section 5(k) mandates the Bureau to “organise training and development programmes for procurement professionals.”
Section 5(s) authorises it to “coordinate relevant training programmes to build institutional capacity.”
To be exceedingly clear, these provisions are neither decorative nor optional. They are legislative instruments of mandate. The BPP is not overstepping its authority. It is walking precisely within the path laid down by the National Assembly.
To argue otherwise is to claim that a driver’s licensing agency cannot test drivers because the law does not spell out “Thou shall conduct written exams.” It is the kind of argument that should come with a warning label: Hazardous to logic.
● A false analogy, falsely delivered
Attah’s tedious attempt to equate the BPP’s training role with media regulation by the Nigerian Press Council is like comparing “akara” with “moi moi.” Yes, both are made from beans, but we all know they do not taste the same at all.
Regulatory bodies like the BPP exist within defined legal boundaries to serve public interest. Their role is not to hoard professional identity, but to safeguard process integrity. The CIPSMN and BPP do not compete. They complement.
CIPSMN’s mandate is to regulate the profession. The BPP’s mandate includes regulating procurement practice in public institutions. These are different mandates. To confuse the two is bad. To do so wilfully is worse. To build an entire article on such confusion is a monumental tragedy.
Universities teach law. The Nigerian Law School certifies lawyers. Both coexist. Attah’s turf-obsessed worldview reduces procurement to a battle for exclusivity. That is not how policy ecosystems work.
● On SPESSE and selective memory
Now to the Sustainable Procurement, Environmental and Social Standards Enhancement (SPESSE) programme, the part that really seems to boil Attah’s blood.
SPESSE is not a rogue project. It is a federally approved, World Bank-supported initiative launched to build capacity in Nigeria’s procurement ecosystem via six accredited universities. The BPP’s role in coordinating and facilitating training under this project is squarely within its legal mandate. Section 5(s) is not a footnote. It is the legal spine of this very effort.
Attah’s demand that the BPP must transform into a university or professional institute before it can manage SPESSE is akin to asking the Ministry of Health to become a hospital before implementing a vaccination drive. The logic is nonexistent. And the desperation is palpable. At this point, Attah needs to give it a rest, if only for the sake of public decency.
● Certification and the great grammar gymnastics of Attah
Attah harps on the difference between “organise” and “conduct” like a man clinging to a life raft in a sea of irrelevance.
His weak and futile argument is that some other institution is supposed to do the actual training of procurement professionals. This is the rhetorical refuge of someone who has run out of credible arguments.
By Attah’s incredible logic, no university should teach medicine because the Medical and Dental Council exists. No business school should operate because ICAN does certifications. No other agency should do investigations because, well, according to Attah’s unimpeachable logic you already have the Nigeria Police Force. You see how tiring this gets?
The BPP designs training programmes, administers curriculum, partners global institutions, and issues certificates through the Nigeria Procurement Certification Platform. This is not semantic posturing. It is public policy in motion.
The Bureau’s partnerships with CIPS-UK, the World Bank, and leading Nigerian universities are not signs of overreach. They are evidence of seriousness. Nigeria deserves procurement officers trained to global standards, not stuck in the archaic politics of territorial gatekeeping.
● Intellectual arrogance drenched in blatant error
Why Attah has chosen to personalise what should remain a professional discourse is unfathomable. My response to his initial article was collegial, polite, and rooted in what I believed was a shared desire in nation-building.
But now Attah chides me for being an “interloper”. That is amusing. Because what he has paraded is not expertise, but the intellectual equivalent of a toddler insisting the sky is not blue because they say so. He cites no legal precedent. He offers no case law. Just line after line of conjecture served with unnecessary disdain.
If Attah wants to play watchdog, he should bring facts. Not emotions contorted into delusional grandstanding. If Attah wishes to criticise the BPP, he should do so from a place of legal rigour, not wounded ego. The Nigerian public procurement system deserves scrutiny. What it does not deserve is the brand of clueless obstructionism Attah continues to offer.
Let us end the charade. The law is not on Attah’s side. The facts are not on his side. It is time to move the conversation forward, away from petty turf wars and towards the professionalisation of Nigeria’s public procurement in action, not just in words.
■ Sufuyan Ojeifo is a member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors and publisher/editor-in-chief of THE CONCLAVE online newspaper.
