Measures for Evaluating Ethical Performance of Construction Projects in Nigeria

Abstract

Globally, the measurement of project performance is on the parameters of time, cost and quality variables, even though other equally important metric like ethics exist. Particularly in Nigeria, ethical, performance is a vital metric of the overall performance of a project given the embedded culture of corruption in public sector projects. Scales of measuring ethical performance of projects are nearly non-existence in Nigeria. Drawing from extant literature, the 2007 Public Procurement Act together with learnings from an ethnographic study of an erosion control project in Anambra State, Nigeria, this study therefore, explored metrics for measuring ethical performance in public infrastructure projects in Nigeria. This study concludes that the development and implementation of a measurement scale for unethical practices at the pre-award and post-award stages of the nation’s public sector projects, is an imperative. The study recommends that governments at all levels should undertake ethical performance evaluation of their completed projects, and categorize the projects based on their ethical performances.