Nigeria’s Upper Legislative Chamber, the Senate, on Tuesday issued stern warnings to the Chief Executive Officers of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Zacch Adedeji; the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), Mele Kyari; Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Olayemi Cardoso, the Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun; among others, threatening them with arrest warrants for repeatedly ignoring its invitations to clarify queries raised on their financial reports.
Expressing serious concerns over billions of Naira reportedly unaccounted for in their yearly budgets, the Upper Legislative chamber frowned at the refusal of the affected revenue-generating agencies to answer queries raised by the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation (OAGF) on their financial statements.
The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Senator Aliyu Wadada, who expressed the position of the Senate while addressing journalists in Abuja, lamented that the defiant attitude of the affected agencies’ CEOs and the IGP was undermining the National Assembly’s constitutional roles in budgeting and by implication, sabotaging national development efforts.
The lawmaker described the unaccounted funds as useful in national development efforts, promising to seek the removal of non-compliant agencies; CEOs from office if they persisted in their defiance to appear before the committee by strongly making a case for their removal from office to the President.
The committee chairman said: “The affected agencies heads are causing disharmony between the legislative and executive arms of government and sabotaging the President’s renewed hope agenda.”
Specifically, Wadada accused the Chairman of the FIRS of ignoring eight invitations and refusing to respond to official communications, adding that “the Chairman of FIRS has intentionally refused to appear before this committee or respond to communications. He risks a warrant of arrest if he ignores the next invitation.”
The lawmaker listed other agencies’ CEOs that had repeatedly ignored Senate invitations of up to nine times as including Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), and Nigeria Communication Satellite Limited (NIGCOMSAT).
Wadada maintained that if President Bola Tinubu could make out time to present the national budget at the National Assembly despite his busy schedule, no government appointee should feel to be above the law when it comes to issues of accountability in governance.
He threatened: “Whoever refuses to appear before this committee will face a warrant of arrest, and we will call on the President to disengage such persons.”
The Committee chairman said that constitutional instruments would be applied against non-compliant CEOs of the agencies, adding that the Senate will not hesitate to publish their audit queries in national newspapers if they remained adamant to honour the invitations to them on queries raised on their financial reports by the OAGF.
