•Urges agencies to cooperate
•NNPC recovers N771m from dubious petroleum marketers
Chineme Okafor in Abuja
Nigeria’s
attempts at stemming the tides of official corruption for years now
have been hampered by the inability of the various government agencies
set up for this purpose, to work collectively and in unison, the British
Council, which is an agency of the government of the United Kingdom
(UK), has said.According to the British Council, anti-corruption
agencies of Nigeria such as the Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission (EFCC); Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB); Independent Corrupt
Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the Nigeria
Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) which recently got independence from
the EFCC, have continued to work in silos, thus frustrating the fight
against corruption.The Programme Manager of the Rule of Law and
Anti-corruption (RoLAC) Programme of the British Council, Mr. Uche
Emmanuel, stated this at a workshop organised for anti-corruption
agencies and law enforcement officers by the Nigeria Extractive
Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI); European Union (EU) and the
British Council, yesterday in Abuja.The disclosure equally came
at a time the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), stated
that it had recovered assets worth over N771 million from some oil
marketers who had under-paid it for petroleum products supplied to them
from Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC) Kaduna Depot.Speaking
at the workshop which was initiated to educate anti-corruption and law
enforcement agencies on the need to push further NEITI’s mandate in
Nigeria’s extractive sectors, Emmanuel noted that most often the
anti-corruption agencies take up isolated and high profile corruption
cases without recourse to each other for cooperation.“The
challenge is that most of us continue to work in silos. Most of the
agencies that have been instituted to fight corruption, not just work in
silos but many of them are working at what I call the micro level.“They
are so fixated on their primary mandate, and I said this to them at the
EFCC in-house retreat they had last week, that they are so fixated on
their primary mandate and forget the big picture,” said Emmanuel in his
assessment of the country’s anti-corruption fight.He added:
“Several times we could get so fixated pursuing one very high level
corruption case, pursuing one highly exposed person forever and get all
the media attention, but you are set up to impact a country of 200
million people, and so one isolated mega case will not take us to where
we are going, and you cannot do it in a silo. Nobody is an island; you
definitely need to work with people.”Also speaking at the
meeting, the Executive Secretary of the NEITI, Mr. Waziri Adio, stated
that NEITI’s work of identifying revenue leakages in the extractive
sector have yielded minimal results as regards stemming the tides
because these law enforcement and anti-corruption agencies do not take
interest in its periodic reports.Adio explained that the
agencies could for instance take up NEITI’s recent report on monies
Nigeria has not been able to gain from its failure to review a 1993
production sharing contract (PSC) regulation despite existing clauses
that guarantee such review.Adio said: “We need to come to the
table with knowledge. Our job in NEITI is to produce reports and we have
done that and put in the public domain. Where our work stops is where
the works of others start, but does that happen all the time? Not
necessarily.“We would love a situation where we can go beyond
just the reports, stimulate the debate, implement reforms, investigate
and prosecute. We need to put a price on bad behaviour. We need to
collaborate to ensure these bad practices stop. And we can look at it
from an output-input framework. Our work as important as it is, if you
don’t use it, it is then useless.”Meanwhile, the NNPC said in a
statement sent by its Group General Manager, Public Affairs, Mr. Ndu
Ughamadu, that the recovered assets from dubious oil marketers, was done
with supports from the Department of State Security Services (DSS);
EFCC; and ICPC.It said its anti-corruption committee, led by Mr.
Mike Balami, brought in forensic experts to uncover the shady deals by
some of the marketers affected.The statement quoted Balami to
have stated that some of the assets recovered included filling stations;
water factories and six sports utility vehicles.
Balami added that the forensic investigation would be extended to other petroleum products depots across the country.According
to him, it was established that the affected marketers lifted petroleum
products from the PPMC Kaduna depot without evidence of payment and
when confronted with the evidence they admitted to the offence and
failed to pay their liabilities.He equally explained that NNPC
Group Managing Director, Dr. Maikanti Baru, was passionate about
stopping all the leakages in the corporation, stressing that the
forfeited assets would be handed over to NNPC Corporate Asset Boarding
and Disposal Committee (CABDC) for immediate disposal.Balami
noted that investigations into lifting of petroleum products without
evidence of payment would continue. He thus urged all relevant
stakeholders to support the anti-corruption committee to recover such
monies outside NNPC’s system.
He claimed this was the first time the
NNPC would be taking over assets forfeited by marketers who defaulted in
their terms of engagement.
Source:- Thisdaylive
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