Two Firms Battle for Lagos-Ibadan Rail e-Ticketing Contract

By Adedapo Adesanya

The Nigerian Railways Corporation (NRC) has pre-qualified five firms to submit their technical and financial bids for the provision of e-ticketing solutions for Lagos-Ibadan and Warri Itakpe Standard Gauge railway lines.

Two bidders were shortlisted for the Lagos-Ibadan line e-ticketing contract while three lots were shortlisted for the Warri-Itakpe line.

Euhoria Press Limited and Paragon and Global Software Digital Solutions Limited were shortlisted for Lagos-Ibadan, while the three shortlisted for Warri-Itakpe included Fane International Consult Ltd., Turnaround Engineering Ltd. and Electronic Payplus Ltd.

The Director Procurement of NRC, Mr Ben Iloanusi, explained at the Requests for Proposal (RFP) exercise in Lagos that NRC had issued an RFP that would analyse the technical solution and the financial strength of the bidders.

The Director, Transport Infrastructure of the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC), Dr Emmanuel Onwodi, commended NRC for their diligence and transparency in selecting e-ticketing service providers.

Mr Onwodi said that the commission was running a two-stage process with the idea of coming up with a preferred bidder that would go into partnership with the Federal Government to deliver the secure solution for the running of the e-ticketing.

“What we have done before now is the Request for Qualification (RFQ) at the end of the exercise, we have pre-qualified five firms and we have issued them RFPs, meaning that they had asked to submit their technical and financial bids.

“We have not started the evaluation of the bidders yet, we just want to find out if all the requirements such as soft copies of their proposal, three years audited statements, power of attorney, and all documents were written in English to make the interpretation easy.

“Congratulations to all the bidders, they all passed the RFP exercises and now the evaluation team will pick each of the submissions one after the other and evaluate based on merit,” Mr Onwodi said.

He said that after the approval of the evaluation report in line with the approval processes, the authority would invite the successful bidder for negotiations.