The Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation (AGF) is the institutional fulcrum against graft and official corruption. Where this office is properly established and functional, corruption in public offices is often a rarity. This is why any attempt to curb fiscal indiscipline and financial recklessness often starts at the office of the AGF.
This office tracks all financial transactions in all ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) by releasing annual audit reports. It issues queries to individuals and units found to be remiss in handling finances. The report is statutorily presented to the Senate annually and also placed in the public arena.
By the very act of this report from the office of the AGF, accountability and transparency in government’s finances are ensured. This way, too, individuals and civil society groups would be able to track government expenditures both generally and as it concerns them.
The last time a proper report was presented to the Senate was in 2004 when the then AGF, Mr. Vincent Azia, released the report for 2002. The report which was in itself a novelty as there was hardly any notable one before then, caused so much uproar in the polity. The report was a showcase of financial malfeasance and recklessness in the extreme. Hardly any MDA was clean, even the Presidency and National Assembly (NASS) were not only held up for finagling over finances, they had many unanswered queries.
Not many other serious audit reports had been released since then. It seemed quite convenient both for the Senate and the Presidency not to care about the AGF’s reports. In fact, all through the era of President Goodluck Jonathan the only reports that emanated from the office of the AGF were about the poor funding of this critical office.
It is based on the foregoing that we applaud the recent directive by President Mohammadu Buhari that all outstanding audit queries must be resolved within 30 day. Miffed by the wretched state of the AGF’s office currently, President Buhari during a meeting with the AGF called for an immediate return to the standard operating procedures and financial regulations in the service.
In addition, the president ordered that going forward, audit queries must be answered within 24 hours. “The era of impunity is gone,” said the president. As stated by his media aide, “President Buhari will ensure that public officials and civil servants in the service of the Federal Government pay heavy price from now on for violating financial regulations and disregarding audit queries.”
The real issues here are impunity and a complete disregard for laid-down rules and procedures governing public service. Just as is the case with tracking expenditures, so it is with monitoring remittances from MDAs to the federal treasury. Impunity reigns supreme in this area too, for instance, it was reported last week that the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) found that the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) company failed to remit about $11.6 billion (N2.32 trillion) between 2009 and 2012.
Particularly notable is the frustration of the NEITI chief, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed who lamented that issues thrown up in her agency’s audit reports had remained unimplemented, describing the situation as “an unfortunate recurring decimal.”
All these indeed paint a picture of a state mired in fiscal anomie. Revenues both at the state and federal levels are not tracked while expenditures have no proper accounts. The individuals and bodies concerned ignore audit queries when they manage to come and nobody seemed to care. There is no better way to gauge a collapsed polity than by the way finances are managed.
While we salute President Buhari for identifying one of the main sources of graft in the system, we urge him to go beyond the periphery. The rot is very deep so he must make fundamental changes to the system.
The office of the AGF is a key institution of state; it requires a complete overhaul and retooling to enable it carry out its crucial assignment. There is also a need to set up a body to track the revenues of MDAs and ensure that they are duly remitted to the treasury. We must cage impunity now.
