Let’s beg civil servants

IN January 2022, the Nigerian government discovered more than 500,000 secret bank accounts it suspected were being used by civil servants in ministries and government agencies to hide stolen funds. According to a presidential press release that spoke about the discovery, civil servants in different states of the federation were working with their governors to hide stolen funds meant for the people, their own friends, family and even children in secret bank accounts.

In June 2021, the then Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Abdulrasheed Bawa, disclosed that the commission found N1b (one billion naira) in the account of a civil servant. For emphasis, here is how Bawa captured the discovery: “A billion naira, sitting in an account, not properties, cash. Just to tell you the problem we have.’’

In February 2017, civil servants, working with bankers were found to have stashed $151m in different fictitious bank accounts. The then Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, said the culprits included civil servants and bank officials who all connived to stash away these recovered monies.

In October 2024, concerned Nigerians under the aegis of Nigerian Coalition of Civil Society Organisation (NICOCSO) drew Nigerians’ attention to $20b that Nigeria had spent on turnaround maintenance of four local refineries since 2007 while importing more than 1.6 billion litres of Premium Motors Spirit (PMS).

For decades, funds, huge funds had been released to contractors to fix our refineries and nothing was fixed. There are civil servants working with politicians and PMS contractors making money from our suffering. They all made it look like these refineries that once delivered 85 percent of our needs, now need rocket science to function. Worst still, they made it look like new ones can’t be built until Aliko Dangote built one and made us look like a nation of incompetent fools.

It is good to want to live well. It is good to desire the good things of life. It is even good to want to save for the rainy day. But to rob a three-year-old to achieve all that is absolutely evil. And that is the kind of evil that the thieving evil servants do. They take money that belongs to the sick, the aged, the helpless and buy mansions in choice parts of the cities. They sized themselves up, decided that their N500,000 per month salary means they can own properties on the same lane with Mike Adenuga and Femi Otedola. In their reprobate minds, billionaires do not have two heads and so they deployed their ‘one-one’ heads to undo the few good things our ancestors left for us.

They steal pensions, the sweat of pensioners, which my mother of blessed memory equated with taking away the walking cane of the aged or blind. They steal from lepers, even lepers. How do evil civil servants sleep knowing that their evil is killing, maiming, destroying destinies, enlarging the numbers and ranks of orphans, widows and widowers all over the country?

I keep asking myself how a man who earns N5m per annum can drive a N120m Mercedes Benz.

‘Ijo n ru, alufa n sanra.’

Members of the congregation are losing weight while the cleric gains weight. Who does not know that the priest is robbing the altar? It is okay to see an altar full of offerings and be tempted. It is even pardonable to take a few pieces to the burnt offering and justify it by saying you do not want the altar to collapse. But when those we trusted with the altar decided to double-cross the live cows and take it to set up private farms, what do we call that?

The altar men, the priests we pay with our taxes and IGR, are eating both the sacrifice and the altar. That is exactly why nothing is working. And before you start the line of argument of how politicians are the real thieves, ask yourself how the political head of a ministry or an agency can steal without his or her Permanent Secretary’s signature. Those who know and you will too, if you ask former Ministers or Directors-General who tried to do things on their own. Then ask yourself, who provides the information and documents that ICPC, Police, EFCC, DSS use when they go after any government official? Yes, only civil servants know where all the dead bodies are buried. They know what to do; they are in charge of policy and funds disbursement.

They can actually fix this country if they decide to. They can make this country work if they want, starting tomorrow. But will they?

Our education sector has failed but civil servants who earn N10 million in a whole year have two children in UK varsities where they pay N50 million. We do not have working refineries as a nation that discovered oil in 1956, but our civil servants in the Ministry of Petroleum and its agencies have properties in Maitama, Asokoro, Lekki, Ikoyi. EFCC is currently investigating how three billion dollars could not fix our refineries and how a former MD became the owner of N80 billion. Our roads are death traps but top civil servants in the Ministry of Works are living large. They are not satisfied with a piece of the offering. They want everything. How do they sleep, pray and fast when they hear of accidents on the roads whose contract files they took huge kickbacks on and left undone, unfinished and half done?

We are bad people, really. That’s why we work with politicians to steal from our own children. Ask yourself again, what is the essence of all the stolen wealth if your children are jobless in Nigeria or become minimum wage workers in UK who you still have to support from Nigeria?

I put it to all civil servants (I was one for few years) that no politician can steal without your consent.

Funke Egbemode