ACCOUNTABILITY AND PUBLIC SERVICE 

There must be an end to impunity in the MDAs

Nigeria’s public finance management system is a study in the absurd. Despite supposedly laid down rules, the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) have continued to indulge in acts that run contrary to accountability and transparency. Sadly, all the shenanigans are done with the connivance of the National Assembly members who ordinarily should exercise oversight over public spending. Some of the ridiculous disclosures in recent budgets, including that of 2026, may elicit laughter but there is nothing funny about the issues at stake. All the officials involved in these sordid activities should not be allowed to get away with their audacious fraud. Failure to successfully prosecute suspects for financial infractions has led to all manner of silly explanations for gross incompetence and plain theft of public resources in Nigeria.

BudgIT, a nonprofit organisation that uses technology to improve transparency in budgets and public spending, has recently been raising serious concerns about how the federal government now runs several concurrent budgets, using revenues from one year to fund another in a manner that leaves little or no room for accountability. “When projects that do not align with national objectives are inserted into the budget and remain unfunded due to revenue shortfalls, it is inappropriate to roll such projects over into subsequent fiscal years, as done with the 2024 and 2025 re-enacted acts-that are yet to be seen,” says BudgIT CEO and co-founder, Seun Onigbinde. “Yet, this is precisely what the federal government has done. Inefficient and unfunded budget items have been allowed to persist, creating a distortion in fiscal planning. The result is a system that attempts to fully fund capital items without properly prioritising other critical obligations or correcting unrealistic assumptions.”

Almost every year, audit reports to the National Assembly from the Auditor-General for the Federation (AuGF) reveal how MDAs of the federal government fail to account for stupendous sums of money. And nobody is ever held accountable for these lapses. A recent report by the GIFT Nigeria Project with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) revealed that revenues generated by MDAs may not be in full compliance with remittances to the public coffers as required by law. That, of course, does not shock anybody. Nigerians are regularly regaled with cases of lack of accountability in the MDAs, yet the executive and legislative arms of government do little or nothing to punish the masterminds or plug the obvious leakages in the system that fuel the miscarriage of financial discipline and transparency. In a country where snakes and monkeys swallow or siphon ‘raw cash’, it is not strange that ‘termites’ have also been found to consume vouchers containing details of how billions of Naira was spent.

Meanwhile, the Fiscal Responsibility Act (as amended) seeks to provide for prudent management of the nation’s resources, ensure long term macro-economic stability of the national economy, and secure greater accountability and transparency in fiscal operations within the Medium-Term Fiscal Policy Framework (MTEF). But this Act, despite a recent amendment in 2023, is still replete with several loopholes which have made government revenue/finances vulnerable to massive looting, corruption and lack of accountability in the MDAs. For instance, the Act identified several offences/violations inherent in the MDAs without providing adequate sanctions to punish offenders.

In a nation where the mechanism for accountability diminishes the farther away government is from the centre, one can only imagine what is happening in the 36 states and 774 local government areas. But we cannot continue to run affairs without accountability. The growing culture of high-level impunity and grand corruption must be confronted with the seriousness it deserves at all levels of government.