Nigeria has launched Open Treasury Portal, aimed for the publicity of financial activities of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). I want to commend the government for this. A few days ago when I was in the National Assembly, one of the leaders told me that something was going on on some of my suggestions. I had made a case that Nigeria needs to have an open portal to track invoices and receipts. That was in my Inaugural Address as the President of LinkedIn Nation!!. Many politicians have read that piece which was well received by the community.
It is also magical that government is going with my cut-off amount. I had proposed N10 million – “We will publish any government expense that is more than N10 million in a web diary which all citizens will have access to”; government has mandated the AGF to publish “ reports of transactions made to MDAs at N10 million and above.”Certainly, this is not a new idea: someone just did it.
Pillar 1 – Anti-Corruption & Business Reform: We will build a corruption-free nation where it would be extremely impossible to perpetuate corruption because technology will make things obviously transparent. All government systems must be structured to be corruption-resilient so that people that want to perpetuate corruption will fail. We will publish any government expense that is more than N10 million in a web diary which all citizens will have access to. This applies to all levels in the federal government, from ministries to agencies. For national security reasons, a segment will be available to the civil society and accredited press team. Our government will improve business systems and make doing business in our nation easier.
While this is an improvement (velocity, variety and volume must improve in the disclosures as currently present in the portal), I challenge the government to implement the full anti-corruption framework as noted in this video. If we do this, we will reduce procurement corruption by more than 87%.
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Inaugural Address by Ndubuisi Ekekwe, President, LinkedIn Nation
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To catch thieves here, you first need to understand and master all the sophisticated ways they operate, else they will dribble you while you watch.
Publishing expenses isn’t the problem, but JUSTIFYING the published amounts is, I am yet to see how open publication would address that. Somebody can comfortably put ‘Consultancy Services’ as subhead, with N200M attached to it, now who determines if the supposed ‘consultancy’ actually worth N20M, let alone N200M? The portal doesn’t give clue on that.
You see where more than N600M is spent on constructing 3 storey building, with no special features, with almost a billion naira on 1km of road; the portal won’t catch any of the stealing, it will only provide talking points. We create bureaucratic bottlenecks whose only known purpose is to waste money and perpetuate frauds, and we keep believing that government can’t be lean or highly efficient; nothing but scam.
There are many frauds you cannot see while standing up or sitting down, you need to bend very well, put you eye down there; then you will see how rotten the system is.
Let’s say this is the first step out of many, the fraud is multifaceted, so the approach needs to match it.