ICPC warns corrupt Nigerians

THE helmsman at the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Mr Ekpo Nta, has warned the corrupt in Nigeria that it would no longer be business as usual from 2013.
He said under his administration, the commission would no longer wait for petitions from the public before moving against abuse of office by public officials.
He noted that impunity to law and order and non compliance to rules and regulations were the major contributing factors to widespread corruption in the country.
Speaking during a  press interview at the ICPC headquarters in Abuja  last weekend, Mr Nta warned that as from now he would go after “the contractor, who abandons projects on site after collecting mobiliisation fees, the university teacher, who extorts and harasses students, the public servant, who breaches fiscal and budgetary rules as well as persons living in apartments or owning property worth more than their legitimate means.”
He said the ICPC had established two units- Financial Investigation And Assets Tracing And Recovery Units to pursue vigorously the preventive aspect of the commission’s mandate.
Mr Nta further said that he was of a firm belief that prevention of corruption rather than prosecution “brings better and cheaper results” saying “ it is very expensive to prosecute a single corruption.”
He disclosed that the System Review of activities and operations of 185 Ministries, Departments and Agencies yielded the recovery of “N188 million in 2011 from eight MDAs and N25 million from some area councils’ top officials in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
He restated his earlier warning to MDAs that they should not touch unspent funds in the 2012 budget saying: “We are going to check the treasury in January next year to see how much has been returned.”
Mr Nta also talked about the sanitisation of the Contributory Pension Scheme that led  to the remittance of N243 billion into the Retirement Savings Accounts (RSA) of contributors this year.
He noted that before the ICPC intervention, the pension scheme was fraught with irregularities such that “officials on the same level and duration of service had different amount of money credited to their accounts.”
However he said there would no longer be respite for those going on trial.”Under a law reform scheme initiated by the Federal Government, the ICPC act would be revisited to ensure that persons facing trial no longer hide under interlocutory injunction to frustrate their prosecution.”
On the continued poor rating of Nigeria on the anti-corruption Transparency International (TI) chart, Mr Nta averred that the global body’s perception index was not entirely representative of the facts on ground.
He disclosed that the ICPC in partnership with the National Bureau Of Statistics (NBS), had taken steps to produce a perception index of corruption in Nigeria.

Tribune