The anti-corruption war hasn’t started (II)
WContinued from last week e are still looking at the new forms of corruption, and the new tricks which our public servants have got up to. It needs to be noted that corruption is not solely a public sector affair but something every sector in Nigeria engages in. Please read on...
4. Contract inflation of all sorts. I have seen where contracts are doubled and the contractor innocently gets one half of the payment while the other leg goes elsewhere. It used to be that they would create different Tax Identity Numbers for a single company and use the fake TINs, but now, many companies will find themselves paying double Withholding taxes and VAT to government over each transaction, simply because the contract was doubled (all companies should always look out for this at FIRS). I hear ministries and parastatals now route payments through third parties, which then send the correct payment to ultimate beneficiaries after deducting their own addition. To make matters worse, the government operatives will then besiege the contractor to collect some more from the legitimate amount!
5. A growing tendency whereby expensive assets like SUVs are bought for top civil servants, parked at home for a couple of years, and used only to attend weddings over the weekend, but always taken away as ‘entitlement’ whenever their tenure expires. Some take the cars directly to their village houses. What work are they doing to deserve N60million SUVs? Sometimes more than one or two
6. Deliberate obfuscation of asset registers - There is virtually no record of government properties in Nigeria. People have been known to simply claim or sit on some of them. Also some agencies have acquired tons of assets that are not needed. Government agencies operate in silos and hardly share services. This provides a platform for asset acquisitions for the purpose of inflating the value and cashing out
7. Tech-enabled corruption of all types and sizes, where technology is twisted by human interference in order to make big money. No one can be trusted. One would have thought technology - such as GIFMIS/TSA/IPPIS/e-PAYMENT will catch out these criminals but they always devise new ways to escape. And so the CBN recently reported that cybercrime has leaped.
These and many more strategies are being deployed as corruption gets ‘innovated’ in Nigeria.
I had to give this issue a deeper thought when I read the other day, a report in the Punch newspapers where the Speaker of the Kwara State House of On the streets in pidgin English, we say “na where man dey work na im man dey chop”? Or the popular axiom that “gofment
property no be anybody property”? In Yoruba land they say “ao kin se’se ijoba laagun”, translated as “no one must do government work to the level of breaking sweat”. In other words, government work is what you do with half-heartedness and levity