NewsPaper: ICPC’s Partial Shocks

IF Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, ICPC, Mr. Ekpo Nta, intended to shock Nigerians with his disclosure to the Senate Committee on Drugs, Narcotics, Financial Crimes and Anti-Corruption, that some contractors presented forged tax certificates, he at best produced partial shocks.

During his defence of ICPC’s 2015 budget before the committee, Mr. Nta said 50 out of 156 contractors with the Federal Ministry of Works, operated with forged tax certificates. Their activities denied government revenue and its agencies like the Tertiary Education Tax Fund, TETFUND, of huge amounts of money that could have gone into the upgrading of our tertiary institutions. TETFUND derives its funding from taxes companies pay...

Other ICPC activities, according to Mr. Nta, included detecting 45,000 ghost workers on the federal payroll, thus saving N100 billion that would have been stolen. ICPC also shut down 26 illegal degree-awarding institutions. According to Nta, suspects are being prosecuted, and more than 600 convictions have been recorded by the Commission and its sister agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

The picture that Nta paints is partial, and barely representative of the depth of systemic corruption in Nigeria. If one ministry out of more than 500 government ministries, departments and agencies records 32 per cent forgery in tax papers contractors present, it would be interesting to know what goes on in other places. Why did ICPC not make the list of suspects public? How could cases of this magnitude be in court unknown to the public?

Recurrent votes already consume more than 70 per cent of the annual federal budgets. The multitude of criminals warehousing public resources for themselves, make it impossible for the nation to develop its infrastructure. More searchlights need to be beamed on the anti-graft efforts by the media and social advocacy groups. It will help us not only to authenticate fantastic claims like these but also yield the benefit of deterring those who intend to commit crimes in future.

Fighting corruption without letting the public know about it is like lighting a lamp and putting it under a table. The anti-graft agencies must regularly let the public know what they are doing without waiting for annual budget defence rituals before going public with their supposed exploits.

The war against corruption cannot be fought in the closet. If the public cannot assess the effort of public institutions, they lose confidence in them.

ICPC has just begun its works – it has thousands of contractors to investigate in the federal system, states and local governments. When it goes to those ends, it would discover that its work is still in its infancy and therefore the celebrations would have to wait.

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