‘Special insurance needed for anti-graft agencies’

The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to provide a special insurance cover for all the anti-corruption agencies by ensuring life insurance for their personnel.

Executive Director of the centre, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, made the call on Wednesday in Abuja at the launch of the two volumes of “Analysis of Media Report and Corruption cases in Nigeria (August 2017-January 2018 & February-July 2018) organised by CISLAC and MacArthur foundation.

This is as a consultant

for the CISLAC and also personnel of the Social Action (SA), a non-governmental organisation (NGO); Mr. Botti Isaac attributed lack of effective oversight by the National Assembly as a major reason why there are many corruption reports among politically exposed persons who are either heads of government or heads of ministries and agencies.

Rafsanjani said that there was need for the president to show more interest in strengthening anti-corruption agencies to win the fight against corruption in Nigeria.

“We are also calling on the president to as a matter of urgency to work with the National Assembly to ensure that we have whistle blower protection regime that will protect and guarantee the whistle blowers,” Rafsanjani said.

While unveiling the two reports, Mr Botti Isaac said media reportage of corruption was part of the ongoing effort to curb corruption.

According to him, newspapers and online sources were selected and a total of 700 corruption cases were tracked from 18 media houses.

“All media reports on corruption indicated that corruption is visible in a plethora of sectors across the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) including oil and gas, security, education, aviation and sectors,” he said.

He said that the National Assembly should speed up passage of key-anti-corruption legislation, including the proceeds of crime bill and other legislative proposals and improve its oversight function functions to MDAs.

While urging the judiciary to speed up the processing of corruption cases; he also urged the media to do follow-up stories to sustain its reporting and continue to train its personnel on investigative anticorruption reporting and to strictly adhere to journalism ethics. judiciary, health, other