Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja
Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has expressed its intention to henceforth make use of the reports of the Office of Auditor General of the Federation to interrogate the activities of various ministries, department and agencies of government with a view to checking corruption in the system.
NLC President, Ayuba Wabba, said there were several reports from the Auditor General’s office that allegedly indicted ministries and agencies of the federal government, which the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) should have taken up and prosecute the affected officials but the commission was not doing so.
“These are issues that we need to interrogate and that is why the Office of the Auditor General has been aggrieved and he has come out clearly to say that many agencies are not even audited and where he audits them, the report is not respected.
“We call on government very strongly because we are going to partner with the office of the Auditor General of the Federation to actually raise issues about what he has been able to bring out because part of fighting corruption is to ensure that the scarce resources is managed in such a way that citizens are able to get benefit of it,” he said.
Wabba said the event was the first in the series of roundtable dialogue organised by labour with the aim of engaging in the discussion of topical issues to produce policy documents to guide its relationship with government.
“It is about getting information, taking decisions and producing policies documents that will assist both the NLC and its affiliates and civil society groups to do proper engagement with government,” he said.
On the impact of national budget, Wabba said budget making has been rendered a mere ritual, adding that it neither reflected reality nor offered any hope to the citizens.
He said: “The fact is that impact is not being made, so budget system to us is like a ritual every year. We perform the ritual annually and everybody goes in different directions without looking at the performance of the budget or what we have been able to achieve through the budget. I think we have not been doing enough post-mortem for our budget. For instance, what is the actual performance of the 2019 budget? Do we really have value for our monies?
“I got to know that the budget of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) alone runs into billions of naira, like many other ministries, departments and agencies. When you put these budgets together, it will account for about 60 per cent of the national budget. Unfortunately, most times our attention is not being focused on these agencies.”
Wabba added that closely related to the issue of the budget was the issue of accountability and transparency, alleging that in most cases the implementing ministries, departments and agencies are not accountable.
Guest speaker at the dialogue session, Mr. Eze Onyechere, while doing a critique of the national budget, alleged that the preparation and implementation of the budget were riddled corruption.
He explained that a study of the national budgets showed that overheads costs not salaries were responsible for the huge recurrent expenditure.
