For years, public procurement in Nigeria moved to a familiar rhythm. Files circulated. Committees met. Rules were cited. Yet something essential was missing. The instincts that turn policy into habit and compliance into culture never quite took root. Procurement functioned, but it rarely learned. This created challenges.
It was into this quiet gap that the Sustainable Procurement, Environmental and Social Standards Enhancement, a World Bank-funded project, better known as SPESSE, stepped more impactfully at the start of 2025. Many assumed it would follow a familiar path, another certification exercise with modest administrative ambitions.
Under the steady stewardship of the Director General of the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), Dr Adebowale Adedokun, it did something else entirely. By the close of the year, SPESSE had emerged as a compass for directing and locating professionalism in the country’s procurement ecosystem.
The most important achievement of 2025 was not numerical. It was a change in the way procurement is perceived in its entirety.
● Reframing Procurement as a Profession
Under the leadership of Dr. Adedokun, the BPP made a clear and deliberate pivot from treating procurement as a clerical necessity to establishing it as a regulated profession. This shift did not arrive with fanfare. It came through standards patiently defined and enforced.
Procurement officers were increasingly spoken of as custodians of public value rather than processors of paperwork. This distinction matters.
Nations do not bleed resources by accident. They do so when systems quietly reward mediocrity and call it normal.
Training under the SPESSE project was therefore never approached as a numbers game. The Bureau insisted on structured learning pathways that privileged depth over attendance and competence over certificates.
The underlying logic was simple yet profound. A procurement officer should understand value for money with the same seriousness a physician applies to dosage.
Technical proficiency was fused with sustainability, due process, and fiscal discipline. To be clear, the aim was to produce professionals trained to think, weigh, and judge rather than merely tick boxes.
● Restoring Discipline and Integrity
Importantly, the BPP did not suspend its regulatory instincts in the name of capacity building. One of the year’s most consequential, if uncelebrated, achievements was the consolidation of oversight around procurement training itself. By anchoring SPESSE project firmly within a regulated ecosystem, the Bureau restored order and credibility to a space long vulnerable to opportunism.
This act of deliberate discipline protected the reform from dilution. It ensured that capacity building did not become an open market of good intentions.
Ethics, too, moved from aspiration to architecture.
Integrity was treated not as a sermon but as a skill. Modules on conflict of interest, transparency thresholds, and accountability norms were woven directly into the curriculum.
In this design, lay a subtle but powerful reframing. Procurement, long caricatured as a corruption exposed function, was repositioned as a frontline institution of public trust and a bedrock of good governance.
● Locking Reform into the System
This recalibration found its clearest expression in a landmark policy move. With the backing of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s wider governance reform agenda, Dr Adedokun secured preliminary approval to make SPESSE project-bolstered professional procurement certification mandatory for all federal procurement officers. This alignment between political will and institutional leadership proved decisive.
By embedding the professional certification programme into the formal requirements of service, SPESSE project was freed from the uncertainties of funding cycles. It was elevated into a permanent feature of professional statecraft.
Last year’s tangible outcomes have given weight to this foundational work. Between April and June alone, over 3,429 officials successfully completed professional examinations across procurement and social and environmental standards.
The total number of Nigerians to be trained under SPESSE programme is put at over 85,000 in the public and private sectors. The scale speaks for itself. It is simply ambitious, yet achievable.
The programme met all its core objectives for the year. It earned a satisfactory rating from the World Bank and secured approval for extended funding through 2026.
● Preparing the ground for 2026
Change, however, is rarely just technical. It is emotional and institutional. On this front, the BPP displayed uncommon attentiveness. By engaging professional associations and practitioner communities as co-owners rather than passive recipients, SPESSE shed the posture of an external imposition.
The Bureau’s messaging was steady and reassuring. This was about strengthening professionalism, not displacing people. Anxiety softened into aspiration. Reform gained allies within the very system it sought to improve.
By the close of 2025, the cumulative effect was unmistakable. Procurement officers were not merely better trained. They were better oriented. Standards were clearer. Expectations were firmer. Regulatory authority was exercised with calm purpose.
As the SPESSE project moves through 2026, the ambition subtly shifts. The task ahead is not expansion alone but also consolidation.
With mandatory certification on the horizon, deeper integration with MDAs, and a growing emphasis on applied competence rather than classroom learning, the programme is poised to shape behaviour as much as knowledge.
If sustained with the same institutional discipline and political backing, SPESSE in 2026 will begin to do what mature systems do best. It will make good practice routine, and poor judgement costly. This is not a small thing. It is patiently and almost imperceptibly how countries grow up.
■ Sufuyan Ojeifo is a journalist, publisher, and communications consultant based in Abuja.
