5 firms shortlisted for Nigerian Rail e-ticketing

By Aisha Cole/Lagos

The Nigerian Railways Corporation has picked five firms to submit technical and financial bids for e-ticketing solutions on Lagos-Ibadan and Warri Itakpe railway Lines.

Two bidders were shortlisted for Lagos-Ibadan line, while three lots were shortlisted for Warri-Itakpe line.

Euphoria Press Ltd. and Paragon and Global Software Digital Solutions Ltd., were shortlisted for Lagos-Ibadan.

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, said the NRC had issued Requests For Proposal (RFP), to analyze 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 its diligence and transparency in selecting e-ticketing service providers.

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 request for proposals, meaning that they have been 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 year 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,” 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.