Looted Funds and Nigeria's Public Accountability Gaps

Nigeria lately has been lucky, though, for the wrong reasons. Money has metaphorically been falling from the sky when the nation is in severe economic distress and needs every dollar to meet her obligations. First, it was the series of Abacha loots. From the United States alone, approximately $332.4 million were recovered. Between March 2021 and May 2022, €6,324,627 was recovered from foreign countries, according to the former Justice Minister, Abubakar Malami. This is among recoveries from other countries. The latest is from unknown persons and unidentified sources in Jersey, a Channel Island. The funds worth $8.9m are believed to be proceeds of corruption disguised as government-sanctioned contracts in 2014 for arms purchases but diverted to shell companies. The silent heist in Nigeria is not executed with masks and guns but with pens and deceit. The nation is robbed of her promise with the bleeding dry of public funds.

In the dance of corruption, Nigeria's public funds are the unwilling partner, waltzing away from the grasp of those who need it the most. The key actors are those we entrust with our commonwealth.

Though these alleged looted funds, though were never declared missing before being recovered now, raise a lot of fundamental questions and concerns about our public finance management and accounting systems. To the best of my knowledge, our government has never declared any fund missing, our auditors never raised any red flags about some money that cannot be traced, and nobody has been prosecuted on account of public funds traced to foreign countries. Since there is no justification for this kind of unaccounted fund that escaped our public finance gatekeepers and National Assembly oversight, the proper inferences to draw are ; there is a failure of our public finance management system, official fraud, or we are simply a criminal enterprise posing as a responsible Sovereign.

This issue is not peculiar to Nigeria though . The United States, the bastion of democracy and policeman of transparency, once invited Ernst and Young to audit the Pentagon as its Department of Defence is called. The auditor, mid-way into the exercise, concluded that the financial records of the Pentagon were riddled with irregularities to the extent that a reliable audit was simply impossible. However, the US case is a different context; some funds were untraceable, leading to significant changes.

The Nigerian case is hard to understand. Almost all recovered looted funds can be traced to government officials under the guise of legitimate transactions but end up in private accounts abroad. Yet nobody is punished, not even the civil servants who are the enablers and the contractors who serve as conduits are called to account .

Each time news of discovery or recovery of looted fund breaks , we are happy. However, the painful realisation that each recovered loot speaks to the gaps in our governance accounting and audit reporting system is yet to dawn on us.

The brazenness with which government actors loot public funds, inspired by the conviction that there will be no consequences, erases any hope of a pause in official corruption.

Lack of effective internal control, non-tracking of financial transactions, absence of proper and regular audit trails, and weak oversight have combined to rub us of any sense of financial discipline and responsibility. This explains why no alarm or red flag is ever raised about the misuse of public funds. The criminal prosecution of the immediate past Accountant General of the country, whose office administered the state treasury, for alleged fraud depicts the depth into which we sank in official corruption.

Failure of governance often goes hand in hand with corruption and lack of accountability. Nigeria's weak institutions and governance structures generally lead to a lack of stability and hinder the government's ability