The World Bank has identified inaccurate information at the Federal Government level as being a major hurdle preventing timely and automatic generation of fiscal data in Nigeria.
World Bank County Director, Dr. Ndiamé Diop, made the observation yesterday in Abuja, describing it as a constraint to achieving transparent reports. The occasion was the launch of AGORA policy and its partners in Abuja.
Represented by a senior official of the bank, Debby Isa, Diop said: “We talk about transparency, but in order to have transparent reports you need to have the data and that data needs to be accurate and reliable.
“And right now the data system requires all kinds of manual processes that allow for leakages that have long affected the system.”
In a key note address entitled “The state of anti- corruption policy and practice in Nigeria: a political scientist approach”, Prof Adele Jinadu said Nigeria’s festering corruption could not be addressed by adopting a ‘watch night man’ approach, stressing that anything short of a holistic approach would amount to a waste of time.
Adele said the holistic approach was expedient in view of total loss of confidence by Nigerians across the state’s institutions.
He lamented the pervasive state of corruption across entire Nigeria institutions, saying the fear of the unknown made the majority of Nigerians cowards.
“In spite of all the efforts placed on fighting corruption, constitutional reform we can’t get anywhere. We are dealing with the toxic environment of our lifetime.
We are building in vain. No matter what we do corruption is about morality. Our political leaders are doing the opposite of what the laws say.
Unless characters and integrity come into our politics, we will go nowhere,” Jinadu said. He enjoined political actors and those in the position of authority to be accountable
“To EFCC, Human Rights Commission, ICPC, INEC; Code of Conduct Bureau; and the Public Complaints Commission, the message of this Keynote is that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Let the sentinels on the watch-tower sleep not, and slumber not.
Nurturing such night watchman civic virtue is an indispensable and durable guardrail against the political culture of impunity of our elective public political office-holders,” he said.
