21st July, 2017
The Lagos Water Corporation on Friday started the disposal of its unusable assets in different locations, with one of the lots having a winning price offer of N18.75 million.
The Managing Director of the corporation, Mr. Muminu Badmus, said that in the disposal of the assets, the agency had applied the appropriate State Public Procurement methods to make the process transparent for the bidders.
According to him, for the first time, the corporation is bringing transparency into its disposal of government assets.
“Not only that, there is also a reserve price that will tally with the quoted price for the items for disposal.
“It is not a situation where the government assets were offered at giveaway prices.
“The corporation is expecting to rake in some good amount of money from the proceeds,’’ he said.
Mr. Deji Johnson, the corporation’s Chief Operating Officer, said that the items which would be disposed of included pipes, electro-mechanical materials and scrapped metallic materials.
He said that the interested buyers picked procurement documents containing instructions on the submission of priced quotations, detailed information on the purchase processes and the materials available for disposal.
Johnson said that the offered price for any of the lot was inserted in the document, adding that each bidder must submit the form with a commitment fee of five per cent of the value of the offer.
He, however, said that the five-per-cent fee would be returned after the completion of the bidding process to the applicants who were unsuccessful or used as commitment fee on the winning offers.
Johnson said that winners, who were expected to make payment within 48 hours of receiving the letters of offer, had two weeks from the date of payment within which to evacuate the materials from the locations.
He said that if the first winner failed to make payment or evacuate the materials from sites within the specified period, the next responsive offer would be considered.
Johnson said that the first winner would then forfeit the offer, while and the five-per-cent commitment fee would be returned to him.
Mr. Adebola Lawrence, the Corporation’s Head of Procurement, said that the equipment and materials for sale were listed and packaged into lots for an effective process.
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According to him, the items to be disposed of are at the corporation’s head office in Ijora and its offices in lsasin, Amuwo and Iju-Ishaga.
He said that the Ijora site had 10 lots, comprising steel pipes, power transformers, trucks, cranes, electricity generators, backhoe loaders and escalators.
Lawrence said that the lshasi site had five lots, comprising cast-iron pipes and Amuwo had one lot, while the Iju-Ishaga site had seven lots consisting of cast-iron pipes, tractors, power transformers, BIM (Building Information Modelling) structures and scrapped containers.
Mr Abiodun Salau, the Managing Director of Faydee Nig. Ltd., one of the bidders, said that the corporation had set a standard for the bidding process for government assets in the country.
He commended the state government for the transparency it displayed in the process, saying that it was worthy of emulation by other states.
Salau said that the process should be sustained in all the procurement processes in the state.