Evidently, the whistle-blowing policy has given momentum to the anti-corruption campaign. Since it was unfurled in December last year, no fewer than 2,251 actionable pieces of information on loot recovery had been passed on to the Federal Government by Nigerians.
Government had promised between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent incentive to any whistle-blower. With its cascading positive result, government should scrupulously keep faith with its reward pledge. As of February 12, less than two months since the policy was announced, it had led to the recovery of $151.7m and N8bn from three sources, according to the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed.
This does not include the $9.8m cash owned by a former Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation that was discovered in a dingy apartment in a Kaduna suburb. “The biggest amount of money, the sum of $136.7m, was recovered from an account in a commercial bank, where the money was kept under an apparently fake account name. This was followed by N7bn and $15m from another person and N1bn,” the minister said.
Other seizures have been made since then, the most recent of which is the $43m cash discovered in an apartment in Osborne Towers, Ikoyi, Lagos, which Ayodele Oke, the suspended Director-General of the Nigeria Intelligence Agency, claimed belonged to it. Also, on April 19, a Federal High Court in Lagos ordered a temporary forfeiture of N449m cash, found abandoned in a Bureau De Change office in Victoria Island, Lagos, by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
Whistle-blowing was first put to test a few days after it was adopted as a public interest instrument when an artisan exposed the 47 Sports Utility Vehicles and buses parked at the Abuja home of a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, where he had gone to do some work. The vehicles, media reports said, were allegedly bought with N1.5bn, part of the N27bn insurance premium of deceased workers of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria.
More Nigerians will be enamoured of government’s fidelity to its side of the bargain to join the whistle-blowing train, especially in Europe and the United States, where they seem to be more livid and embarrassed than those at home by the ease with which public officials rifled through the public treasury during the last political dispensation and thus, pauperised the majority of citizens. With much of the looted funds and assets hidden abroad, the campaign should be extended there.
Government’s commitment should not only be typified in the cash reward, but also in the concern for the legal protection or safety of the whistle-blower at home and in the work place. For instance, Ntia Thompson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was sacked for exposing a $229,000 and N800,000 fraud. The money, which was approved for the Directorate of Technical Cooperation in Africa, was embezzled. It took spirited protests from him and public disapproval for the Presidency to order his reinstatement. This should not be so. Two dons suspended at the University of Ilorin last year for alleged insubordination, faulted the authorities’ claim. They alleged that they were victimised for exposing corruption in the system.
For this reason, a new level in the implementation of the policy, which is legislation, is urgently required. Although the Federal Government has forwarded a bill to this effect to the National Assembly for consideration, what is more important is seeing it through. Unfortunately, the legislature is accustomed to delaying the passage of such bills. The Freedom of Information Bill is an example of a piece of legislation that took so long for it to be passed into law; just as the Petroleum Industry Bill has been with it for over seven years because of selfish interests.
If the whistle-blowing bill is to be saved from a similar fate, activism then is required from civil society groups, the media and other concerned bodies, to jolt our indolent lawmakers into action. This is critical. An anti-graft campaign without any robust legal structure is hollow. The US has a whistle-blowing policy that dates back to 1863 when the False Claims Act was enacted. It empowers an individual to sue corporations and persons with the intent to defraud the government and such a person is entitled to half of any recovery. In the United Kingdom too, its whistle-blower protection law has been strengthened with the Public Interest Disclosure Act of 1998.
A few features of the whistle-blowing bill before the National Assembly, as reported in the media, are critical: the offences of disclosing the identity of a whistle-blower and his victimisation. The media should be conscious of the fact that those deprived of enjoying their loot are like wounded lions: they are in the mood to kill. This is why we consider an aspect of the reportage of the $43m “Ikoyi-gate” that revealed the identity of the whistle-blower as one of the security guards at the Towers as reckless journalism. It breached one of the canons of journalism practice – protection of the identity of a source or informant.
Consequently, this mechanism, which has proved so effective to the point that the Federal Government has now decided to extend it to the recovery of arms and ammunition in wrong hands, should not be toyed with.
