The “Ghost-Tech” Chicanery And The Shadow Economy Of Emergency Procurement

There is a predictable choreography in public procurement whenever a health emergency breaks into the national consciousness.

The alarm comes first. Then the press conference. Emergency funds are released. Surveillance is strengthened. Laboratories are equipped. Isolation capacity is expanded. In a genuine emergency, speed is not a luxury. It can be the difference between containment and catastrophe.

That is precisely why emergency procurement deserves extraordinary scrutiny.

Nigeria’s procurement law recognises the need for speed. The Public Procurement Act permits emergency procurement in circumstances involving disasters or catastrophes and allows direct contracting where the conditions prescribed by law are met. But an emergency procurement route is not an accountability-free route.

That distinction matters.

During the COVID-19 response, the Bureau of Public Procurement made clear that although prior “No Objection” was not required before emergency procurement, procuring entities remained subject to accountability, transparency and value-for-money principles. Contractors were still expected to possess the requisite capacity and eligibility, while procurement records and reports remained part of the accountability process.

The question, therefore, is not whether government should move quickly during a health emergency. It should.

The harder question is whether the records, assets and results move with the same speed as the money.

Nigeria’s own COVID-19 experience provides uncomfortable evidence.

A special audit of the Federal Government’s response found that the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control paid ₦118.86 million to staff as cash advances for procurement that the Auditor-General said should have gone through proper contract procedures. It also identified ₦486.3 million in unretired cash advances at the time of the audit and ₦38.12 million in COVID-19 funds spent on projects unrelated to the pandemic.

Those findings do not establish that every emergency contract was fraudulent. They establish something more important: emergency conditions can expose weaknesses in procurement controls that ordinary procedures are designed to contain.

Contractor verification presents another vulnerability.

Investigations into COVID-19 emergency spending raised questions about contractors whose corporate records, eligibility or capacity were difficult to establish. That is where the expression “briefcase contractor” should stop being a journalistic insult and become a question of evidence.

Who was the company? Who owned it? What was its corporate history? What technical capacity did it possess before the emergency? What exactly did it supply? Who inspected the delivery? Who certified completion? Who received the money?

And what remained after the emergency passed?

That last question points to the emerging problem of Ghost-Tech.

The procurement ghost may not always be something that never existed. It may be something that technically exists but cannot perform the function for which the public paid.

A disease-surveillance dashboard may have been built but never integrated into a ministry’s operational system. Software may have been licensed but never meaningfully deployed. A diagnostic machine may have arrived without essential components, trained operators or maintenance support. A surveillance system may have been installed but never connected to the institutions expected to use its information.

The technology is physically present.

Institutionally, it is absent.

That is the distinction.

Delivery is not deployment. Deployment is not utilisation. Utilisation is not performance.

Yet public accountability often stops at the first milestone: a contract was awarded, something was delivered and somebody signed a completion certificate.

What happens afterwards?

Where is the equipment? Does it work? Who operates it? Who maintains it? What did it produce? Who owns the software and data? What happens when the licence expires? What happens to the asset when the emergency ends?

These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum questions that should follow public money.

The deeper danger is institutional memory loss.

The emergency ends. The cameras leave. Officials move. Contractors disappear from public view. Equipment becomes somebody else’s responsibility. Years later, an auditor may encounter a payment without an obvious operational consequence, while an investigator searches for records that should have been readily available.

This is where emergency procurement can become a revolving door rather than a bridge to permanent capacity.

The answer is not to abolish emergency procurement. A country facing an epidemic cannot wait months for a conventional procurement cycle before obtaining essential medical equipment.

The answer is to make emergency accountability as real-time as emergency spending.

Every emergency contract should leave a searchable trail: the legal basis for the emergency, procuring entity, contractor and beneficial owners, contract value, procurement method, specifications, delivery location, completion status and responsible officials.

There should also be a post-emergency asset audit. Six months after the crisis, government should be able to say what was purchased, where it is, who has custody, whether it works, what it has achieved and what remains under warranty or maintenance.

An emergency may justify speed.

It does not justify disappearance.

The real ghost may not be the machine that never arrived. It may be the paper trail that becomes impossible to follow after the payment has been made.

And when the trail disappears, the public is left with the most expensive technology of all:

trust without verification.