Zinox Group Chairman Leo Stan Ekeh has alleged that a large proportion of technology equipment procured by Nigerian government institutions and corporate organizations is refurbished hardware presented as new.
Ekeh put the figure at about 57 per cent during a session at the Nigerian Bar Association annual conference in Port Harcourt.
The claim was presented by Ekeh and was not accompanied in the source material by an independent audit or dataset establishing the percentage.
He argued that the practice persisted partly because procurement processes did not sufficiently recognize legitimate local partnerships established by international technology manufacturers.
According to Ekeh, organizations often preferred foreign brands without adequately verifying whether equipment was genuinely new.
He said this created risks involving fraud, poor value for money and reduced reliability of technology used for critical operations.
The Zinox chairman called for sanctions against companies found to have supplied refurbished products as new.
He also urged stronger implementation of the Nigeria First Policy.
Ekeh said government ministries, departments and agencies should give greater consideration to indigenous companies and locally developed solutions where they met required quality standards.
His wider argument was that local procurement should support technological independence rather than simply substitute one vendor for another.
Ekeh said Nigeria could not claim strategic independence without developing stronger domestic technology capacity.
He also emphasized the role of digital procurement systems in improving transparency and verification.
The conference session examined how electronic contracting, stronger compliance and local capacity development could improve public procurement.
Ekeh also said lawyers needed to understand the technological and regulatory dimensions of increasingly digital procurement systems.
Other participants included senior officials from the Bureau of Public Procurement, NITDA and state procurement agencies.
Speakers called for procurement systems that combined authenticity, transparency, competition and value for money.
Ekeh said those reforms could protect public resources while giving credible Nigerian technology companies greater opportunity to grow and compete.
