- It’s double whammy as NPA corrals billions of earned revenues while grossly under-declaring imported cargo
It may be most apt now to introduce a new word – sleaze-dom – into Nigeria’s lexicon of graft. Each day, fresh tales of fraudulent activities break out in the media just in the manner of viral diseases. No ministry, department or agency (MDA) of government seems to be free or exempt from corrupt practices. Those not yet on the front page of infamy are only those not yet placed under the spotlight.
Since the advent of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, the immediate past administration of President Goodluck Jonathan has literally turned out to be an era of confounding sleaze and malfeasances. Never in Nigeria’s history of nationhood has there been such widespread and wholesale plundering of her common wealth as it has turned out in these last five years.
Among the current heart-breaking missives is the story of the Nigerian Ports Authority, (NPA). It is a double whammy at the NPA where it has been revealed that last year alone, revenue amounting to N162 billion was realised and only a paltry N2 billion was remitted to the treasury.
Still at the NPA, it was reported last week that 80 per cent of cargo imports into Nigeria was under-declared by the managers of Nigeria’s ports. This revelation was made by the Nigerian Shippers Council (NSC).
These two pieces of information though seemingly disparate, are tied by the underlying billions of naira which ought to have accrued into Nigeria’s treasury but which ended up misappropriated or in private pockets.
It isn’t that there would not be underhand practices in environments imbued with a constant streaming of large volume of cash. What rankles is the degree of greed and the rapacious hunger to loot it all. It is bad enough that the NPA management declared merely N162 billion (even though it could have been double that amount), there seems to be a troubling reluctance to remit funds into the national treasury.
In the same manner, in-coming cargoes had to be under-declared not even by 50 per cent, but a numbing 80 per cent! In simple terms, it means that additional revenues could have been lost by a whopping 80 per cent. These incidences only epitomise the level of financial and administrative recklessness bordering on impunity that characterised the running of most MDAs, especially in the last 16 years.
It may not come as a surprise that the NPA, not unlike most other honey pot agencies (like the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Company (NLNG), has turned out to be a probable house of sleaze as has been reported. Recall that in the last one and half decades, NPA had been chaired by the bigwigs of the now-discredited former ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), including Chief Bode George. What this suggests is that the highly liquid agency could easily have served as conduit pipe for political slush funds.
Worse, such huge funds were generated and simply siphoned with no attempt to plough back into the system or develop the ports. The known improvements that have taken place in some of the sea ports over this period were the result of private participation and concessioning of portions of the major ports to private operators. Other than these, the ports under the NPA have become dilapidated and bereft of basic facilities.
At the premier Apapa ports for instance, the rail line running through it for easy evacuation of cargo have been long moribund. The major roads round about the ports have been in a state of disrepair for over a decade, with attendant bottlenecks and crippling traffic for port users.
We urge the Buhari administration to hasten to sweep out all the bad eggs in this crucial sub-sector of the nation’s economy and revamp it for the good of the economy. We also demand that those who have ravenously raped this institution must not go unpunished; they must face the law to serve as deterrence. Government must vanquish impunity which has become pervasive in the system; it must cleanse this sleaze-dom.
