The Federal High Court in Abuja has ordered the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to immediately make public details of all appropriations and statutory transfers in the 2014 budget in the public interest.
The order was issued by Justice Abubakar Abdu-Abdu-Kafarati in his judgment in the suitfiled by the Centre for Social Justice against the minister.
Justice Kafarati asked the minister to release to the group and the public, details of releases in the budget to some key government agencies, specifically the National Assembly, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), National Judicial Council (NJC), Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), Universal Basic Education (UBE) and National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).
Under the amended Nigerian constitution, the listed offices are considered statutory bodies whose funding are drawn directly from government treasury to foster their independence.
Their budget details had also not been made public since 2011.
According to an online news medium, Premium Times, the Executive Director of Centre for Social Justice, Eze Onyekwere, said the group approached the court to compel the minister to respect the law and release the information pursuant under the Freedom of Information (FoI) and the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
Onyekwere said following observed acts of impunity and fiscal lawlessness by government, namely the expenditure of several billions of naira in the budget without appropriation, fraud and illegal allocation of revenue under various questionable sub-heads, it became necessary that details of such allocations be revealed to the people, who are the owners of the budget under democracy.
But, he said in spite several requests since 2013, the minister of finance had continuously refused to comply, accusing her of shielding from sanctioning officials in charge of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) where ghost workers have shown up on their payrolls.
“Government has always claimed it has served billions of naira from its efforts to rid ghost workers from the system, but, we have always asked, without any response, for details from each MDA prior to and post-verification, including the numbers and names of the accounting officers, in terms of Permanent Secretary, Head of Personnel and Accounts/Payroll officers,” Onyekwere said.
He said the personnel officers were those responsible for certifying that the payroll was consist of genuine workers, while the accounts officers prepare the vouchers for the permanent secretary to sign before the authority to incur expenditure, AIE is raised for the final payment.
Citing the case of the Budget Office of the Federation (BOF), where it was found recently that prior to the verification, it had more than 1,000 staff on its payroll every month, only for the figure to crash to only 251 afterwards, he said the problem would be resolved if the minister agreed to expose the perpetrators.
“All we have is a minister of Finance who has refused to bring out the details of these scandalous findings. Yet, we talk about the commitment to fight corruption. Nigerians are entitled to know. We cannot continue to run a system where some people simply come to loot the treasury and they want everyone to clap for them to go on,” Onyekwere said.
He condemned the continued appropriation of funds in the budget under Service Wide Votes, noting that any allocation for any MDA that cannot be included in its approved budget was subject to misappropriation or diversion.
Onyekwere said the provision of about N118 billion as personnel cost under SWV in the budget was suspicious and questionable, as there is no agency or department of government called ‘service-wide votes’ that has workers that should be catered for separately.
Other questionable appropriations under the service-wide vote include about N21 billion to INEC for “elections logistics and support,” apart from about N45 billion already provided for it in the budget, as well as an additional N1.8 billion for pilgrimages.
Apart from the N150 billion appropriation for the National Assembly, he said the provision for another N100 billion under SWV for constituency projects was fraudulent, as most of the projects neither follow set national vision nor government development agenda.
He frowned at the penchant for government officials to capitalise on the current insecurity in the country to manipulate the system to their selfish ends. (0)
Court orders Okonjo-Iweala to disclose budget details of national assembly
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