Looted Funds And Nigeria’s Public Accountability Gaps

Nigeria lately has been lucky, though, for the wrong reasons. Money has metaphorically been falling from the sky when the nation is in severe economic distress and needs every dollar to meet her obligations. First, it was the series of Abacha loots. From the United States alone, approximately $332.4 million were recovered. Between March 2021 and May 2022, €6,324,627 was recovered from foreign countries, according to the former Justice Minister, Abubakar Malami. This is among recoveries from other countries. The latest is from unknown persons and unidentified sources in Jersey, a Channel Island. The funds worth $8.9m are believed to be proceeds of corruption disguised as government-sanctioned contracts in 2014 for arms purchases but diverted to shell companies. The silent heist in Nigeria is not executed with masks and guns but with pens and deceit. The nation is robbed of her promise with the bleeding dry of public funds. In the dance of corruption, Nigeria’s public funds are the unwilling partner, waltzing away from the grasp of those who need it the most. The key actors are those we entrust with our commonwealth.

Questions And No Answers

Though these alleged looted funds, though  were never declared missing  before being recovered now,  raise a lot of fundamental questions and concerns about our public finance management and accounting systems. To the best of my knowledge, our government has never declared any fund missing, our auditors never raised any red flags about some money that cannot be traced, and nobody has been prosecuted on account of public funds traced to foreign countries. Since there is no justification for this kind of unaccounted fund that escaped our public finance gatekeepers and National Assembly oversight, the proper inferences  to draw are ; there is a failure of our public finance management system, official fraud, or we are simply a criminal enterprise posing as a responsible Sovereign.

This issue is not peculiar to Nigeria though . The United States, the bastion of democracy and policeman of transparency, once invited Ernst and Young to audit the Pentagon as its Department of Defence is called. The auditor, mid-way into the exercise, concluded that the financial records of the Pentagon were riddled with irregularities to the extent that a reliable audit was simply impossible. However, the US case is a different context; some funds were untraceable, leading to significant changes.