CCB boss laments failure of anti-corruption laws, agencies July 23, 2014by Ade Adesomoju, Abuja Leave a Comment The Chairman of the Code of Conduct Bureau, Sam Saba, has bemoaned the failure of the numerous anti-corruption laws and institutions in the country to improve the nation’s accountability profile. Saba said this in Abuja on Wednesday at the official release of the report on the Phase III of the Technical Unit on Governance and Anti-Corruption Reform’s ‘Scoping Survey and Gap Analysis of Anti-Corruption Initiatives in Nigeria’. The CCB boss said, “At the Inter-Agency Task Team retreat in Kaduna in 2010, anti-corruption agencies noted that Nigeria has an impressive array of structures, institutions and laws aimed at combating corruption. “Despite the existence of those laws and institutions for enforcement, Nigeria still falls short of the standards and requirement of an effective anti-corruption regime as embodied in the international anti-corruption conventions.” He also lamented the disclosure in the TUGAR’s report that none of the 10 states sampled in the survey had a modern audit law. The 10 states are Cross River, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Jigawa, Katsina, Kogi, Nasarawa, Ogun, Taraba and Yobe. Saba said, “While going through the summary of the mapping and scoping survey findings, I felt sad that of all the 10 states sampled, none had a modern audit law. “Many states are yet to comply with domestic financial regulatory standards not to talk of international best practices which Nigeria has long acceded to.” He pledged the support of the Code of Conduct Bureau towards TUGAR’s “drive for better anit-corruption reforms in Nigeria”. Chairman of IATT, Mr. Ledum Mitee, who presented the report, described corruption as “pervasive and sweeps through the facets of our society”. “The effect of corruption on the Nigerian society and economy has been devastating, particularly as it continues to affect the government’s capacity to provide basic services and directly impacts on the well-being of the population and its ability to rise out of poverty,” he added. He explained that TUGAR was a research, monitoring and evaluation unit set up to provide empirical data collection and analysis to aid “rigorous approach to policy making.” He added, “Thus, our effort to combat corruption and improve governance has to be prosecuted on the basis of credible data and informed studies especially on the critical aspects of our governance and the economy.” In her address, Executive Secretary of Nigerian Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, regretted that there were “gaps between laws, policies and actual implementation and enforcement.” She noted that TUGAR’s report confirmed the earlier findings by NEITI “prudent and transparent allocations of public revenues as well as efficient and judicious management of public finances in Nigeria.” She said, “For instance, the TUGAR survey showed that most states recorded abysmal Internally Generated Revenue making them totally independent on federal Allocation to meet basic expenditures. The NEITI FASD report also threw up similar findings. “The report shows that from 2007 to 2011 about N23.7trnwere remitted into federation account as mineral revenues out of which N8.22trn was disbursed to the states government and 13 per cent derivative states.”
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 20:38:18 +0000
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