Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, has asked the Auditor-General of the Federation, AuGF, Adolphus Aghughu, to avoid semantic gymnastics when he gives the nation a run-down of the audits of ministries and agencies.
The rights group flayed Aghughu for recanting his findings on the consolidated financial statement of the Federal Government in 2019.
It wondered how the AGF is denying that any cash was missing after he told the National Assembly on the 18th of August 2021 that unsubstantiated balances amounting to N4.973 trillion were observed by his office in the audit carried out on the consolidated financial statement of the Federal Government in 2019.
HURIWA expressed shock that the President Muhammadu Buhari government which claims to be fighting corruption was at the same time unwilling to fund the office of the AGF.
The group tasked the AuGF to resign from office if the required material and human resources necessary for efficiency and effectiveness of the office is not provided rather than collecting salaries and allowances for doing next to nothing to detect the colossal and mind-blowing corruption and theft of finances of the public by ministers and Directors General of agencies.HURIWA said it does not take a soothsayer or naysayers to verify that public sector corruption has destroyed the nation’s strategic infrastructures due to lack of maintenance.
The rights group said it was unbelievable that the focus of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is on chasing young students about over their despicable involvement in advance fee fraud or yahoo yahoo whereas the largest number of economic saboteurs who are embedded in the public sector of Nigeria are allowed to get away with their monumental and mind-blowing corruption and theft of finances of the public.
HURIWA said that regrettably, as soon as the news got to town that the ministries and agencies failed to give satisfactory accounts of the huge imbalances in expenditures and releases, the same AuGF who had raised the alarm of lack of synergy and balance in the books of the different ministries came out to deny the obvious and asserted that no cash was missing but still failed to explain why no money was missing. Yet the accounts weren’t balanced as he had alleged.
HURIWA recalled that the Office of the AuGF had said no money is missing from the Federation Account in a clarification note released by the AuGF’s press unit.
HURIWA called for an independent forensic probe of the audits submitted by the AuGF “because from the drama that has played out with his affirmation of a lack of balance on the books of the ministries and now the clarifications that no cash is missing, what is clear is that the contradictions need to be untangled by a totally independent body of forensic financial auditors.
HURIWA said the Buhari administration was adept at forcing and coercing enforcement and investigative bodies within government to hide their findings of mind-boggling thefts by the political appointees just so the All Progressives Congress government will appear like a saint which isn’t the case.
HURIWA charged the EFCC to invite the AuGF to render scientifically and accurate audits of the accounts of the Federal ministries because of the yawning gaps between what the ministries claimed to have executed and what’s is on ground as evidence of frauds and lack of transparency and accountability.
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