The Presidency and the gamut of Nigerian Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have been tasked to take up the challenge and focus on holding public servants and contractors responsible for public expenditures in form of contracts or payments executed by the federal government.
Gabriel Okiowo, Principle lead and Chief Executive Officers, BudgIT said this on Thursday, on Channels TV.
Okiowo said the federal government has demonstrated its willingness to fight corruption by public access to its books on spendings and details of receivers of amounts above N5million and N10million in Ministries Departments and Agencies.
Okiowo who said the action of the government promoted anti-corruption, maintained that the Nigerian public must rise through the various NGOs and demand accountability on the contractors who received such monies especially, why certain civil servants are hellbent on re-routing the monies to their benefits.
He argued that its recent analysis of the 2021 budget showed two payments of N141m to a school in Benue State.
He charged the federal government and the NGOs to interrogate such spendings, as he stressed that the Minister may not be aware of such payment hidden in the budget.
“Can we now have accountability, as we are saying it now because the Minister for Works may not know and the legislators may also not know; even ICPC may not know but we have done our job to bring it out.
“Can we now move to the next level of accountability? The name of the contractor is there, one of the beautiful things that the government has provided, and the portal that we have built, govspend.ng is that anybody can go to govspend.ng and put the name of any contractor there, that is receiving a contract from the federal government of Nigeria.
“Then, you’ll be able to see all the contracts received from the federal government.
“We are not just shouting against the public office holder, can the EFCC, the ICPC and the law enforcement agency of this world also begin to call out and blacklist those in the private sectors that have been used as a plan, for corruption.
“Truly, no public office holder can assign or award a contract to him or herself. They would do that to a private and then reroute it to wherever they want to be rerouted to.
“It is high time we began to also call those private sectors out and blacklist them. So that they are not able, to receive contracts again from the federal government and truly, the government had made this possible. They are providing the detail of the contractor. They are providing the payment that is made to them, they are giving us vouchers, payments number and all of that to track and we are tracking.
“What we are seeing is. Yes, there is transparency, but there is little accountability to hold people to account.
“So we have seen increased transparency, not an increase in accountability. Transparency without accountability is not going anywhere. We have seen increases in intention to be transparent and that action that shows this government wants to be transparent.
“The best thing anybody can do is to show you how much they are spending a day, anytime certain amount of money beyond N5million, at MDAs and N10 million at the federal government goes out to any contractor or anybody as a payment.
“They make that publicly available. That is wonderful. But beyond what we are saying, can we now begin to hold people accountable because it is necessary.
“So those are the reasons school is bending, one of the insiders invented the ad 141 million twice being final payment? We have pointed out, transparency has brought that out.
He said the matter can be better addressed with Presidential attention and cited examples of the directive of the president for MDA to avail themselves for budget defence.
Okiowo urged that presidential attention on accountability of public funds with the possibility of having the contractors blacklisted for their role at funnelling monies for their cronies in the civil service would promote value for money on jobs executed.
His words: “I also believe that the body language rights of the president is also very important, Let There be a clear executive order, the same way, the president called on all Executives of MDAs, give them an ultimatum to appear before the legislature to go and defend their budgets.
“The President should also be able to issue such order also to MDAs to the ministers to the executive arm of government to tell them to ground appear before the legislators to defend the reports of the auditor general.
“Then the legislators need to understand that they are not thereby themselves. They are there to represent the people and whatever they are doing. They should do it in the interest of the people. They should not hoard information.
“Sitting here, we cannot say in clear terms in black-and-white how much the federal government, got in funding, in total how much they allocated the complete figure coming from them on how they went into the fights against covid-19 and how these funds were used.
“These are things that should be the responsibility of both the legislators, and the executive, but I believe that in this the legislators have been lots of role play.
“We are engaging with them and we hope that they will, come to terms with this responsibility of their sand and begin to carry them out.
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