Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, made this known on Sunrise Daily, a programme on Channels Television monitored in Abuja.
Adeosun said because of the strict procurement law, some ministries have not been able to access the N350 billion released recently by the government.
She said: “There are some ministries that have been slowed down by the procurement processes. It is about transparency versus speed. We want open tenders because that gives us the best price and that is what also gives opportunities to Nigerians to bid for and to get government contracts.
“If it is taking between four and 16 weeks to get through the bureaucracy, at this point in time, we think we can’t afford those delays. So we need to say ‘look, procurement laws are made for usual times and these are unusual times, can we look at relaxing some of the condition?’
“Similarly there is a transaction we are working on at the moment which is a very pivotal transaction with General Electric – they want to run freight on our own rail system which will create huge number of jobs across the country.
“But it’s bogged down by rules that say ‘you’ve got to do this and that you’ve got to advertise and keep it up for a while;’ we don’t have that time.
“So there are some areas where I think it would be useful to have some legislative amendments.”
The minister also said the plans of the government to get the country out of recession had not changed.
According to her, the plan is to stimulate the economy by redirecting expenditure from recurrent into capital in order to create jobs.
