As treasury looters dig their heels in, while the anti-corruption campaign rages, the Federal Government has rolled out a series of measures to deepen transparency and accountability in public finance management. To drive the process are the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation and the Ministries, Departments and Agencies. A summary of revenue inflows and outflows will now mandatorily be published daily on an online portal.
Payments, which are up to N10 million and above, made from the treasury, will also be published, just as the MDAs will publish any payment up to N5 million, stating the beneficiary and the purpose for which it was made. Public access to information on government expenditure will undoubtedly improve with the new policy. Open governance is an irreducible attribute of democracy. The policy, therefore, should be entrenched at all levels of government.
The President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd), who was represented by the Minister of State for Niger Delta Affairs, Tayo Alasoadura, when the policy was launched last week, said it would ensure that all “government-held data-sets” were made available to the public and the media, in line with the Freedom of Information Act 2014. Accordingly, an online portal, www.opentreasury.gov.ng, has been set up.
All the MDAs are expected to publish monthly performance of their budget, functions and economic activities; while the AGF will “publish monthly fiscal accounts, detailing fiscal performance of the federation, including receipts from all the (revenue) collection agencies and payments out of the Federation Account.” This means that details of revenues generated by the Federal Inland Revenue Service, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Nigeria Customs Service, Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency and Nigerian Ports Authority, among others, will be in the public domain. This is a welcome development.
Besides, quarterly financial statements for the government as a whole and the MDAs are now imperative. Under this regime, some key appointees have been sacked for indulging in corrupt practices, just as public office holders and the bureaucracy fiddle with the annual budgets. It is, therefore, not surprising that Annual General Purpose Financial Statements should be published by the AGF, prepared in line with International Public Sector Accounting Standards. These reports should be published within a month after the end of the first quarter.
The government’s apparent inability to track its funds and expenditures facilitates the persistent looting of public treasury. For this reason, the Central Bank of Nigeria, Ministry of Finance and the AGF had in the past given conflicting figures on public finance to the chagrin of observers. Such dissonance was dramatised before the House of Representatives ad hoc committee that probed the 2009 to 2011 fuel subsidy scam. The ministry had put the subsidy paid at N1.3 trillion, AGF N1.6 trillion, while the CBN said it was N1.7 trillion – all contrary to the House panel finding of N2.53 trillion in 2011 alone.
The number of purported petroleum products importers had increased from the 2008 figure of 19 to 140 in 2011. Instead of the 35 million litres the country consumed daily, fraudulent charges on the treasury were made for 59 million litres daily.
But the most intriguing revelation of that probe was the 128 subsidy payments of N999 million within 24 hours by the Accountant-General’s office. The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative report of 2017 that said the NNPC never remitted the $15.8 billion it received from the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas, being the Federal Government dividends from its 49 per cent equity holding in the company for 15 years, further strengthens the advocacy for the open treasury portal.
Undoubtedly, had this innovation been in place then, the allegation by a former CBN governor, Lamido Sanusi, that $20 billion oil revenue was missing would have been avoided. PricewaterhouseCoopers, an international firm hired to carry out a forensic audit of the said account, said it had no access to full accounts of some relevant agencies like that of the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company. Consequently, it proclaimed that its work was deficient in accepted auditing standards, a reason for which it offered no opinion, attestation or assurance. This speaks volumes.
With policy somersaults and changes in government, the new initiative will not go far unless it is enacted into law. As a result, the Buhari regime should take seriously, the House of Representatives’ advice that the policy needs a legislative reinforcement. This should include maximal penal sanctions against the violators. Enough of treating public finances as spoils of war as has been the case in the country. In the United States, public funds are under constant surveillance. For instance, its Federal Emergency Management Agency releases a statement of account on the Disaster Relief Fund on the fifth of every month, while the Congress also demands a monthly report on its balance sheet in line with its oversight function.
These are international best practices that Nigeria has ignored for decades, resulting in despoilment of the treasury and lack of funds for the provision of infrastructure: good roads, quality education and health care delivery. With guarded secrecy, special funds such as Ecological Fund and Natural Resources Fund and Stabilization were raided. In one such dubious disbursement from the former account in 2002, N728 million was given as ‘’grant’’ to the Presidential Research and Communication Unit, an expenditure which is out of sync with the objective for which it was established.
Indeed, ensuring good governance is every citizen’s business. This is implicit in the wise counsel of Charles de Gaulle, a former French President, who said, “Politics is too serious a matter to be left to politicians.” Therefore, all eyes, especially those of civil society groups, the media and taxpayers, should be on how public funds are spent here. It is by such altruistic, public civic engagements that public office holders are held to account in other parts of the civilised world.
