- As Kachikwu says NNPC was only reorganised, not unbundled
The Federal Government is investigating additional 11,000 workers to know if they are ghost workers, Minister of Finance Kemi Adeosun said yesterday.
About 23,000 such workers were uncovered recently, saving the government N2.29 billion monthly.
Briefing State House correspondents, Mrs. Adeosun said the Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved continuous audit process, particularly on the payroll.
According to her, the audit would be extended to other areas of government’s expenditure to block fraud.
She said: “The approval of a presidential initiative on continuous audit. In the budget speech, the President said we would introduce a continuous audit process, particularly of the payroll and that work has resulted in the elimination of about 23,000 fraudulent recipients of federal salary and more work is still on.
“We felt that the continuous audit should not be limited to payroll, there is actually need to strengthen internal audit across government and to that extent, the World Bank in 2010 started an initiative to try and introduce real-space internal audit in Nigeria, but it wasn’t successful.”
Stressing that the World Bank indicated its readiness to support Nigeria in the initiative, she added that it would take six months to get the required legislation through.
As a way forward, she said: “So, in the interim, we have agreed to do the presidential initiative on continuous audit, which will give backing to the work we are doing and will allow us to extend this work beyond payroll to other areas of expenditure.”
The minister explained that FEC deliberated about the need for this and agreed that the control framework over finance and spending of government’s money needed to be strengthened, “especially in anticipation of the approval of the budget, which is an extended budget”.
She added: “There was a discussion on the role of existing internal audit offices, the problem they have is that they report to the people they are supposed to be checking on and so they are not able to be as effective as we would like.
“Also, most of what we do now is computerised and we need special audit techniques, computer assistants to do the techniques and special techniques, which some of these auditors do not have,” Mrs. Adeosun said.
She said the government would not recruit any additional people to do the auditing work.
“We are going to use existing staff, qualified accountants within the Office of the Accountant General within the Federal Civil Service and redeploy them to create this function, which we believe will strengthen the control of our public money,” she added.
On the earlier 23,000 ghost workers and the new investigation, she said: “Our payroll has reduced by N2.29 billion per month. The update on that is that we are now investigating another potential 11,000.
“Again we are using computer techniques to identify those who we need to investigate. So, we are now looking at the second batch and as we resolve those cases, we would inform you of the amount saved and the number of people removed.”
In the meantime, , the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Mr Ibe Kachikwu, on Wednesday in Abuja dismissed the assertion that the Federal Government had commenced the unbundling of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
Kachikwu, who is also the Group Managing Director (GMD) of NNPC, made this known while fielding questions from State House correspondents.
He said that what the corporation did was reorganisation of the corporation to achieve greater efficiency in the oil sector of the nation’s economy.
“We have not unbundled NNPC. We had a press conference yesterday where I explained this.
“What we have simply done is reorganisation. We have five business entities focused on business- Upstream, Downstream, Refineries, Gas and Power, that are there before.
“There is also ventures that capture all our little companies that were not having proper stewardship.
“They are run by individuals who report to the GMD. The NNPC is still a whole. There is nothing new that has happened.
“I have tried to explain this and I am sure the NNPC workers are members of the family, they will understand.
“We are going to have a meeting, and they will be made to understand. Perhaps the engagement has not been good enough.
“NNPC has not been unbundled in the sense of breaking up NNPC into distinct institutions. I am concerned. “I don’t want the industry shut down. I am sure we are going to resolve the issues very soon,’’ he further explained.
Meanwhile, governors of Benue, Plateau and Bauchi states, Samuel Ortom, Simon Lalong and Abdullahi Abubakar, respectively, on Wednesday, paid condolence visit to President Muhammadu Buhari.
The governors commiserate with Buhari over the death of Minister of State for Labour and Employment, James Ocholi. Gov. Ortom told State House Correspondents that he did not only commiserated with the president on the death of Ocholi, but also briefed him on the happenings in his state.
“ I decided to come and brief Mr President and to appreciate him for standing by Benue in their times of challenge of herdsmen invasion of the state.
“I’m also here to commiserate with the President over the death of our brother, the Minister of State for Labour, the whole of Benue was in mourning state because Ocholi was a very good friend to the entire people of Benue. “He was with me during the Christmas; he was with me just three weeks ago. “We prayed that the Almighty God will bless his soul and those of his family members,’’ he said.
Nation with additional report from NAN
