Nigeria ponders strategies to combat corruption


The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Ali Pantami, has called for the digitization of government processes to curb corruption that is stunting the full realisation of economic growth.


Pantami’s speech was read on his behalf by the Director-General of National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) Mallam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi during the seminar on anti-corruption recently in Abuja .


The event was organised by the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB).
In his speech, Pantami said the digitisation of government process ensures officials will not have monopoly of power as everything will be computerised and  transparent.
There has been an increase in cases of corruption in Nigeria’s public sector for the past half a decade and the battle to combat the scourge has been ongoing.


The West African nation lost about $1 billion between 2014 and 2018 through fraud, extortion, bribery and subsidy abuse- an amount that is more than Nigeria’s combined capital expenditure on health and education over the same period.
“When you digitize government operations and processes, nobody will have a monopoly of power to compromise, nobody will do things at his (or her) discretion because when the process is being automated, there is no need to meet physically to get services, everything will be open and transparent,” said Pantami.
This will democratize government service delivery, thereby ensuring accountability, simply because records are kept and can be checked at any time needed, he said.


CCB chairman Isah Mohammed said they all needed to work together to crackdown on corrupt activities, which were affecting the government operations and processes in Nigeria.
“The Bureau was established in response to the allegations of corruption against government operations in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s which resulted in a coup and counter coups, with trillions of money stolen from both domestic and foreign bodies as a result of corrupt practices by public office holders and to date we are still striving to eliminate the scourge,” he said.

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