Moral, ethical gap responsible for corruption in Nigeria’s LG - ICPC boss

Independent Corrupt Practice and other Related Offences (ICPC) has revealed that moral and ethical gap in Local Government administration nationwide is responsible for corruption at the grassroots level of governance.

The Commission’s Chairman, Professor Bolaji Owasanoye also disclosed that its investigation from various petitions across the country showed that abuse of procurement process, bribery and embezzlement were some of the attributes of officials in the third tier of government across the country impeding on good governance.

He spoke at a 3-day Sensitisation workshop organised by Osun state government in collaboration with ICPC, for top officials of local government in the state held at the Local Government Service Commission Hall, State Secretariat.

Speaking through his representative, Mohammed Ashiru Director of Education, disclosed that massive disregard for anti-corruption laws and abuse of extant regulations governing the third tier of government is a major set back to development at the grassroots across the country.

According to him, the commission decided to check the growing menace by embarking on training staffers of local government on the need to embrace transparency, honesty, and integrity in their dealings.

He added that quite a number of local governments across the country have participated in the training with numbers of personnel enhancing their knowledge about fighting corruption.

“From petitions so far received and investigated, ICPC had discovered wanton disregard to anti-corruption laws and abuse of extant regulations governing local government administration. Issues such as abuse of procurement process, bribery, gratification, embezzlement, misappropriation and outright stealing are some of the infractions discovered."

“And that simply points to the fact that there are moral and ethical gaps in Local Government administration nationwide that need to be addressed urgently. This is the reason why ICPC decided to introduce special training on ethics and integrity for local government functionaries from across the 774 Local Government Councils in the country”, he said.

Owasanoye added that the commission recovered N77 billion in 2019 from poorly executed or abandoned constituency projects by MDAs as a result of the ICPC initiative.

“A new project ICPC introduced recently, the Constituency / Executive Projects Tracking Initiative, which involves monitoring and tracking of projects shoddily executed or abandoned by Federal Legislators under the guise of Constituency Projects and some projects equally handled poorly or abandoned by some government Ministries, Departments and Agencies after payments might have been made."

“In 2019, we have recovered over N77 billion in cash and assets as stolen funds out of which N18 billion worth of cash and assets were recovered as a result of our interventions in the Constituency / Executive projects”, he added.