Crime and No Punishment

Two things happened in the last seven days that motivated me to write this article. The first, which happened on Monday, was when Governor Umar Namadi of Jigawa state went on a surprise visit to the state secretariat. As at 11am, the offices of several top civil servants were still under lock and key. They were not “on seat”. For all you care, they could be holidaying in Cairo or doing lesser hajj in Saudi Arabia. Namadi met only a handful of low-level civil servants at their duty posts — messengers, cleaners and security personnel. You will have a vital document to process in government and they will always tell you “oga is not on seat”. That is the way we roll in our dearly beloved country.

The civil service, I repeat, is the heartbeat of government. That is the machinery that formulates and implements policies as well as executes the laws and regulations of the land. The best brains populate the public services of countries that know what they are doing, but in Nigeria, it is mostly to do political favours. Many find themselves in the civil service as the last option after a fruitless job search. It was once reported that many civil servants have relocated abroad but are still drawing salaries. We are, thus, losing on all fronts: the civil service is mostly over-bloated, ineptly peopled, grossly inefficient, chronically truant, and endemically corrupt. And we want to make progress.

But you know what? We run a country where there is crime but there is no punishment, so to speak. The civil servants themselves made the rules that regulate their own conduct. Under the guise of “institutional independence”, it is easier for Cabo Verde to win the FIFA World Cup than to sack a civil servant. The processes are so long and cumbersome. That means the Jigawa civil servants that were absent from work — or came late (would they even report for duty after 11am?) — may get only a flimsy query, if any at all. How on earth do we think we can get away with a grossly inefficient civil service and expect the Federal Republic of Nigeria to join the comity of developed nations? How?

I was still trying to recover from this when the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) testified before the house of representatives ad hoc committee investigating the legal basis, operations, and budgetary inclusion of the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC) as well as the N1.3 billion allocated to the council in the 2026 Appropriation Act. Mr Abdullahi Hamisu, the CBN director of banking services, told the committee that the bank indeed opened two domiciliary accounts for the supposedly fake agency on the directive of the office of the accountant-general of the federation (OAGF). He said the bank carried out its standard account-opening procedures before doing so.

This is where it gets more interesting. A week earlier, the OAGF had categorically denied issuing any directive for the accounts to be opened. This directly contradicted a press statement from the presidency which accused Prince Adeyemi Adeniyi, the supposedly fake director-general (DG) of the supposedly fake agency, of presenting fake documents to the OAGF to secure the mandate to open the accounts. Two people cannot both miss a lie — if the recipient does, the liar definitely can’t. Along with the testimony of the budget office, it is becoming very clear that the OAGF was trying to cover up something. The PFIPC evidently secured approval from the OAGF to open the accounts.

But that is not even my worry. The OAGF handles federal government’s finances — covering income and expenditure. The office manages public funds and prepares financial statements. Its core responsibilities are financial reporting, revenue and expenditure control, payroll management, formulating accounting policies, and inspecting accounting systems and standards across all federal ministries, departments, and agencies. Now, if the OAGF does not know that it issued a directive to the CBN to open domiciliary accounts for a “fake” agency, then we are in serious trouble as a country. We are forced to wonder how many “unknown” things might be going on in the office.

It would even be worse if the OAGF actually knew and was only trying to pull the wool over our eyes. If there can be concerted efforts to deny concrete evidence that a directive was issued, what else is going on in the office of the accountant-general that we do not know yet? How do we begin to believe its reports on federal government’s receipts and payments? In any society aspiring to be taken seriously in the comity of nations, there will be consequences for senior officials of the OAGF. But remember that Nigeria is a society where there is crime but — as it were — there is no punishment. Do not be surprised if those officials are nominated for national honours sooner or later.

In my previous article, I pleaded with President Bola Tinubu not to sweep the matter under the carpet. I knew what I was saying. Immediately the PFIPC scandal broke, all I could see were concerted efforts to throw Adeniyi under the bus, as if he acted alone. Press statements from the presidency already judged the matter and concluded that Adeniyi was the sole culprit, even though we were told a probe panel was going to be set up. Why set up a panel when you already knew the outcome? Adeniyi could not have allocated an office to himself at the Federal Secretariat. He could not have inserted a budget line by himself. He could not have happened accounts at the CBN just like that.

I am not a great fan of the National Assembly — with due respect, I think there are just too many misfits and comedians in those hallowed chambers making laws for our country — but I must necessarily commend the house of reps for setting up an ad hoc committee to investigate the scandal. That is actually a major function of the legislature: holding the executive arm of government accountable. I am sorry to say I am not too sure the house probe is going anywhere, but I will keep hope alive all the same. I owe my country that. Even if it ends up being a public show as we have seen many times in our lives, at least we have had the benefit of hearing from more of the actors.

Does anybody still remember the budget scandal under President Muhammadu Buhari? What he submitted to the National Assembly as his first appropriation bill in 2016 was different from what the federal lawmakers ended up deliberating upon. The rumour then was that as soon as he left the National Assembly complex, some civil servants replaced what he submitted with their own version of the budget. Buhari was shocked to his bones — he never witnessed anything like that during his time as a governor, minister and chairman of a governmental body. How can civil servants have the audacity to tamper with the budget submitted by the president? Please, what kind of country is this?

To Buhari’s credit, he fired the DG of the budget office, Mr Yahaya Gusau, and replaced him with Mr Tijani Mohammed Abdullahi. At least, Buhari acted. He sacked the sackable. He could not sack the civil servants, so they were punished with transfers to less “lucrative” agencies. As I said, civil servants made their own regulations to protect themselves from accountability under the guise of institutional independence. We need to tighten these rules. In fact, we need wholesale civil service reforms. Otherwise, we should not expect responsible behaviour from the civil servants. If there is crime, there should be punishment — except our future ambition is to remain a lawless society.

AND FOUR OTHER THINGS…

TRUMP AND TINUBU

Some people were excited over US President Donald Trump’s intervention in Nigeria’s anti-terrorism war for a different reason: they thought there was going to be a regime change. They imagined it and started celebrating. They were sad when the bombings started and key figures in the terror groups were being eliminated. They are even sadder that Trump recently wrote to President Bola Tinubu to commend him on the progress of the war. My hope is that one day, we would be able to separate politics from the national interest. There are other things to play politics with. No matter how much we dislike the president, Nigeria is bigger than him. If Nigeria is secure, it is to the benefit of all. Fact.

PLAYING WITH FIRE

Sunday Igboho fled Nigeria in 2021 at the height of his divisive campaign for Yoruba “naysan” under President Muhammadu Buhari. Many of his supporters, some of them professors, were probably disappointed that he could not use his famed spiritual powers to escape from Beninese prisons after his capture. Igboho is now back in full force, launching a security outfit called “Iru Ekun” (“tiger’s tail”) to flush out “Fulani terrorists” from the south-west as well as Kwara and Kogi states. Forget that we have a military and other security forces — or that Amotekun was set up for the same purpose. We all know where this militia thing will end, if the IPOB experience would be a guide. Dangerous.

WASTE AND MEANS

Tracka, a public accountability initiative of the BudgIT Foundation, has ferreted the 2026 federal budget and discovered a whopping sum of N22.15 billion earmarked for renovation and furnishing of 106 palaces and N8 billion for the construction, renovation or equipping of churches and mosques. That these mundane lines even got into the budget at all is yet another indication of how unserious we are as a people. Imagine what we would find out if we were to use the same fine tooth-comb to peruse the budgets of states and LGAs. We cannot fund education, we cannot fund healthcare, but we can fund saxophones and guitars for churches. And we keep asking why Nigeria is like this. Sad.

NO COMMENT

That the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), under the leadership of Brig-Gen Mohamed Marwa (rtd), has been recording remarkable success in its war on illicit drugs is not in question. But it seems the NDLEA is still scratching the surface. A meth lab, estimated at $380 million, was recently discovered in a forest in Ijebu Ode, Ogun state. In all, 10 suspects were arrested and subjected to a special court hearing. They were paraded before the media by the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS). It is amusing, isn’t it, that four of them are foreigners. When we said we were looking for foreign investors, they thought it was to produce methamphetamine. Hahahaha…