The ongoing scrutiny of the budgets of ministries, departments and agencies by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, has yielded the discovery of N18.39 billion in inflated personnel costs. It is another sad reminder of the high level of fraud that Nigeria’s budgetary process is subjected to annually without any serious official effort to rein in the perpetrators.
From an initial figure of N12.2 billion discovered as of November 14, when the ICPC Chairman, Bolaji Owasanoye, went to the press after the records of 300 MDAs were examined, it rose to N18.39 billion in less than a week. The ICPC boss, who disclosed this recently during the National Summit on Diminishing Corruption in the Public Service, with President Muhammadu Buhari in attendance, lamented that sham personnel recruitment, usually backdated, was often carried out by bureaucrats to cover up their tracks.
Regrettably, N3 billion out of this sum was shared, for which 59 directors have been arrested. The period under review is between 2017 and 2018. Owasanoye attributes this racket to lack of strong oversight in the MDAs. He has, therefore, urged the President to suspend all indicted public officers under investigation. That is the appropriate thing to do; and those with prima facie cases against them should be prosecuted and, if found guilty, punished accordingly. This is the only way graft in public service can be tackled. The prevailing tepid response of just recovering funds and allowing the syndicates to remain in the system is decidedly counter-productive.
Out of the initial amount of N12.2 billion, about N9.2 billion is still with the Central Bank of Nigeria, which would have been withdrawn under the guise of meeting payroll obligation. “We got the MDAs to sign off the money from the CBN and the money is available for government to spend,” Owasanoye said. If such huge amount could be recovered with the inspection of the finances of 300 MDAs out of the over 600 available, the total cash that will be unravelled as padded, when the verification is comprehensively done, can only be imagined.
Interestingly, some universities, whose lecturers have refused to comply with the presidential directive on Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System enrolment, are among the indicted. According to ICPC, University of Benin Teaching Hospital padded N1.1billion; Nnamdi Azikiwe University (N907 million); University of Jos (N896 million); University College Hospital, Ibadan (N701 million); Usmanu Danfodio University (N636 million); University of Ibadan (N558 million); and Federal Medical Centre, Yenagoa (N915 million).
Sadly, citadels of learning, involved in moulding the character of the youth, are also enmeshed in the mess. Undoubtedly, it is a reality check that should inspire some soul-searching by the Academic Staff Union of Universities, which is still resisting the IPPIS policy. It has a Sisyphean task in its recalcitrance amid these unethical discoveries.
As the ICPC enquiry exposed the MDAs, so were the National Assembly lawmakers unmasked in their so-called constituency projects. From the tracking of 255 projects out of its pilot scheme of 424, the commission has recovered N2 billion. Some of the contractors handling the projects have reportedly hurried back to the sites even without ICPC’s prompting, having smelt a rat.
Buhari, who is peeved by this organised pillaging of the treasury, noted that N1 trillion was provided for the projects in the last 10 years without them impacting on the lives of the people. Earlier in July, the ICPC had said that N2 trillion had been expended on the so-called projects since 2000. Simply, the scheme is a short-cut to treasury looting. BudgetIT, a non-profit involved in ensuring accountability in public finance, which tracked the implementation of the projects in 2016, could not trace the location of some as listed in the budget. Some were non-existent, while others were either shabbily executed or abandoned. According to a former Minister of Special Duties, Aminu Turaki, 2,399 of such projects were abandoned in 2013 alone.
From Olusegun Obasanjo to Buhari, every president since the dawn of the Fourth Republic has had a face-off with the lawmakers, resulting, repeatedly, in delaying the signing of the budget. Clearly, providing boreholes; boats; building rural roads; town halls; markets; buying sewing and grinding machines; motorcycles and tricycles to constituents fall outside Federal Government’s schedule of duty, as encapsulated in the Exclusive Legislative list. Some of these procured constituency items have been traced to the homes of lawmakers, a fact that belies their dogged denial that they have no hand in the projects’ implementation.
As the ICPC observed, and rightly so, “Some of the constituency tracking and system review will lead to investigation and prosecution.” The agency should stick to this resolve against the backdrop of Owasanoye’s countervailing view that the commission preferred recovery of funds from the politicians, to embarking on lengthy prosecution. The perpetrators should simply face the wrath of the law.
This is the course of action every civilised society takes where the government is alive to its responsibilities. In the United Kingdom for instance, an administrator, Dennis Harold, from Dagenham, who committed payroll fraud of £2.9 million with Devonshire recruitment, was jailed for four years. Sentencing the crook, the judge, Michael Wood, QC, said his action was an appalling breach of trust.
With ICPC’s seemingly new-found gung-ho against graft, the President should exert the powers of his office to bear on the passage of the Special Crimes Court Bill, to help in expeditious trial of suspects. It is an abject failure of governance that since 2007 when the IPPIS was introduced to stem the tide of payroll racketeering, the thieves in the system are still running riot with their illegality without serious punitive action from the government.
Between 2013 and 2015, the FG paid N220 billion to 103,000 non-existent workers, a former minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, said. In five years, 10 states lost N318 billion. But with a new determined leadership, a redoubled effort by the ICPC driven by appropriate legal sanctions will send the right signal to this band of criminals in the public service and their accomplices.
