The Acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission, EFCC, Ibrahim Magu on Monday said public funds stolen
by 32 entities (human and corporate) between 2011 and 2015 was well
over N1.3 trillion.
Magu disclosed this in his keynote address at the opening
ceremony of the 2019 First Batch Conversion Training Programme to
Procurement Cadre for Federal Parastatal and Agencies, organised by
the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) in Lagos on Monday, March
25, 2019.
In the paper delivered on his behalf by the Commission’s
Secretary, Ola Olukoyede, Magu decried this huge financial loss on
the country.
He said: “One third of this money, using world bank rates and
cost, could have comfortably been used to construct well over 500km
of roads; build close to 200 schools; educate about 4000 children
from primary to tertiary levels at N25million per child; build
20,000 units of two-bedroom houses across the country and do even
more.
“The cost of this grand theft, therefore, is that these roads,
schools and houses will never be built and these children will
never have access to quality education because a few rapacious
individuals had cornered for themselves what would have helped
secure the lives of the future generations, thereby depriving them
of quality education and healthcare, among others.”
He said the poor state of procurement process in Nigeria was one
of the major reasons why corruption has continued to thrive in
government agencies and parastatal.
He identified some of the fraudulent practices in procurement
process in Nigeria to include: kickbacks, conflict of interests,
fraud in the bidding process, bid suppression, collusive bidding,
bid rotation and market division.
Others, according to him, are: co-mingling of contracts, change
order abuse, cost mischarging, defective pricing, false statement
and claim, phantom vendors, product substitution, unnecessary
purchases and purchases for personal use or resale.
Magu expressed confidence that Nigeria still has patriotic and
credible individuals who would do all within their abilities to
uphold the credibility and honesty required for leadership in
public offices.
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