Kemi Adeosun, minister of Finance, believes high level corruption is endemic in Nigeria because it is too easy for people to loot public funds. But she has vowed to block avenues for looting and make it harder to hide stolen funds abroad.
She said this yesterday while chairing a showcase session on the second day of the conference on “Promoting International Cooperation in Combating Illicit Financial Flows and Enhancing Asset Recovery to Foster Sustainable Development.”
The session themed: “Practical steps to stopping illicit financial flows,” was organised by the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, PACAC, in collaboration with the Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs.
“We are taking steps to improve tax administration, to improve compliance and to generally make it a little more difficult for people to loot the treasury. My experience from the little time I’ve spent as a minister is that it’s far too easy to do these things in Nigeria, and we’ve got to make it much more difficult,” said Adeosun.
To her, it is better to prevent looting than to recover stolen funds, which she described as difficult. “From the Ministry of Finance perspective, our view is that prevention is better than cure. Recovering money is exciting but it’s difficult. It takes years. We’re still battling to recover money that was looted from Nigeria 20 years ago. So my perspective as Minister of Finance and as an accountant is: how do we block the money getting out in the first place?” she asked.
Continuing, she said, “How do we strengthen our controls? How do we create the early warning systems that tell us to flag certain transactions?  Let’s stop the money going out; let’s stop the loss, and then we can work on recovery.”
Adeosun is convinced Nigeria could have achieved most of its development goals if public finds had been better channeled. “There’s a saying that you can’t miss what you’ve never had. But when we see our crumbling infrastructure, we are missing what we never had. We are missing the road, the power, the capital projects that could have been funded with money that has left our shores illegally, or money that is concealed within the country equally illegally,” said the minister.
Raymond Baker, guest speaker and President, Global Financial Integrity, Washington DC, proffered solutions to illicit financial flows, including whole government approach, in which all agencies collaborate and share information; indentifying beneficial ownership of stolen funds, effective use of legislation and developing better monitoring systems.
According to him, assets recovery should be a diplomatic issue to make countries realise that relations can be adversely affected due to refusal to return stolen funds.
He also recommended the use of global information exchange systems, among others.
Bolaji Owasanoye, professor and executive secretary,
PACAC, said looting takes place through “suspence accounts” in which banks open accounts without names and numbers, yet people lodge money in them. “We want to see bankers go to jail for it,” he said, believing that that the Bank Verification System, BVN, could be deployed in tracking stolen funds.
“Many CEOs get richer than their organisaions. It’s time to use the legislation on assets declaration  against banks and customs officials,” he said.