Bawa: EFCC recovered N1bn from one civil servant
Abdulrasheed Bawa, chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), says his agency recovered over N1 billion from the bank account of a civil servant last week.
Appearing before the senate committee on finance at the national assembly on Thursday, Bawa said there are leakages that need to be plugged in the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).
The senate panel is probing the internally generated revenues (IGRs) of about 600 MDAs and checking to see their level of compliance with rules and regulations.
The EFCC chairman said as much as the country needs to generate revenue to finance various projects, more efforts should be put into plugging leakages in the system.
“It is good for us to observe for now and wait for your committee to conclude its work so that whatever report you have and anyone that your committee decides, we are ready to take it up from there,” he said.
“We have recovered over N1 billion sitting in the account of a civil servant last week.”
Bawa expressed worry that many government agencies do not have audit reports since they were established.
On his part, Solomon Adeola, chairman of the finance committee, said it is wrong for MDAs to spend the revenue they generate and still obtain funding from the federal government.
“The practice is for them to spend generated government revenues illegally while still collecting funds from the government that has to resorts to borrowing to fund them,” the senator representing Lagos west said.
Please, does the civil servant have no name? Why is he/she being shielded? Unfortunately, those Bawa was speaking to can not claim ignorance of the fact he stated. The problem is that everyone is feeding fat on Nigeria’s problems and ending the problems would be tantamount to removing their own source of “chopping”, so the incentive to make sure things are done correctly, efficiently and effectively is not there.