National Assembly lawmakers-elect have been told not to emulate their unpatriotic predecessors, who failed woefully to consider the Auditor-General’s reports submitted to them since 1999, which contain serial abuse of public funds. Acting on the reports is a heavy responsibility imposed on legislators by the 1999 Constitution to promote accountability in the use of public funds. With mind-boggling corruption in the country, such dereliction of duty is a betrayal of trust, and the height of legislative irresponsibility.
The Auditor-General of the Federation, Anthony Ayine, made the demand during a recent orientation programme for the 469 legislators-elect for the Senate and House of Representatives. Ayine’s focus was on the “Role of the National Assembly in promoting accountability.” The deeply concerned AGF simply continued from where his immediate past predecessor, Samuel Ukura, stopped.
The importance of the AGF office is expressed in Section 85 (4) of the Constitution, evident in its power “…to conduct periodic checks of all government statutory corporations, commissions, authorities, agencies….” Annually, its report is submitted to the parliament for action. Curiously, the reports spanning 16 years have been neglected by the legislators, despite being among the best paid globally. “Corruption has stifled economic growth and development in our country,” says Ayine, who stressed that the implementation of the reports’ recommendations will bode well for transparency and accountability in the system.
Any audit report can only be fully considered when a parliament takes a resolution on it and transmits same to the Executive for necessary action. But this ritual is preceded by a painstaking scrutiny of the audit report and summonses of indicted public officials by the Public Accounts Committees of the two chambers of the legislature, whose final reports are considered and adopted in plenary. So critical is the committee that it is the only parliamentary committee created by the Constitution, in the quest for probity and good governance.
One of the strange elements in the 2016 audit report is the AGF’s observation that 65 government agencies have never submitted their accounts for audit. At a synergy workshop between the House of Representatives Public Accounts Committee and the Department for International Development, United Kingdom, in 2015; Ukura said, “…those reports haven’t been passed to the plenary session, let alone passed to the Executive for implementation.”
Ironically, the Public Accounts Committees of the two chambers, a decade ago, used to collect N100 million combined, as their annual overhead budget for their activities. For 20 years, this allocation runs into billions of naira, but now wasted with the seeming criminal conspiracy of the entire legislature to overlook the findings in the reports. Details of the national annual budget showed that the office of the AGF collected N5.13 billion for its operations in 2014. Other years since 2012 showed annual provisions of between N3.3 billion and N3.1 billion, save the N2.96 billion in the 2019 budget.
Besides, the Accountant-General, whose operations also form the basis of the auditor’s report, draws billions of naira annually for the discharge of statutory duties. With the allocations to the two Public Accounts Committees in the parliament; the auditor-general’s office; salaries, emoluments of personnel; pensions and gratuities for workers in these offices, have all become funds gone down the drain.
However, why they unashamedly indulge in this betrayal is not difficult to fathom. The stench of abuse of public funds wafts annually from their activities. Denuded of moral fibre, they cannot, therefore, champion the cause of accountability and due process in governance. The Auditor-General hardly spares them. For instance, they could not account for N9.4 billion in 2014. The AGF said no “documentary evidence” backed such a huge expenditure. Some of the reports since 1999, recommended cars and cash for recovery from legislators, whose tenure expired, either by tribunal’s nullification of their elections or for not being re-elected, but they were not implemented.
Between 2016 and 2018, the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission, recovered N594 billion stolen by civil servants. More recovery would have been made in a political environment where scrupulous checks and balances are faithfully observed, through the yearly consideration of audit reports and implementation of their findings. According to Johnson Oludare, an Assistant Director in the ICPC, the monies were recovered from 800 ex-employees and 400 others still in active service, all collecting either pensions or salaries, while 1,200 personnel connived with a micro-finance bank to fleece the treasury. This is a tip of the iceberg.
No responsible parliament in the world looks the other way when the public treasury is recklessly abused. In Canada, for instance, the Auditor-General is an officer of its parliament, indicative of the fact that the two institutions act like Siamese twins in ensuring value for money in public expenditure. In Singapore, the Auditor-General Office welcomes any information that relates to loss or potential loss of public funds, for instance, on practices that may point to non-compliance with financial and procurement rules, wastage and extravagance. While our lawmakers trivialise the Auditor-General’s office, South Africa has passed groundbreaking legislation that gives the AG new powers to act on corruption and the abuse of public funds. The Mail and Guardian report that the new law enacted last November, empowers the AG to refer serious audit irregularities for further investigation to the Hawks, the South African Police Service and the public protector. The amendments will also enable the AG’s office to recover lost funds from wasteful and fruitless expenditure and to order the implementation of remedial action. Nigeria is still using the Audit Ordinance Act of 1956.
For the Muhammadu Buhari government that claims to be fighting corruption, the reverberation of the legislature’s negligence of audit reports from the inception of the Fourth Republic, deserves its serious attention. Our bureaucracy must be repositioned to serve as an engine for service delivery. So far, it has failed to be so because of our lawmakers’ complicity.
