The Accountant General of the Federation, Dr. Oluwatoyin Sakirat Madein, commissioned a four-day workshop on anti-corruption practices in public service for 100 officials of the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation at the OAGF Conference Hall, Treasury House, Garki, from 19 to 22 December. The programme, facilitated by Ayemere & Associates Consults, brought together treasury officials from across the OAGF’s directorates alongside representatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, who delivered sessions on enforcement, investigation procedures, and the practical realities of prosecuting financial crimes in the public sector.

Dr. Madein, who was appointed Accountant General in May 2023, said she authorized the training because the OAGF’s role at the centre of Nigeria’s public financial architecture demands that its officials understand anti-corruption not as an abstract compliance obligation but as an operational discipline embedded in the work they do every day. “This office manages the consolidated revenue fund. We process the receipts and payments of the entire federal government. Every procurement approval, every expenditure authorization, every treasury transaction that passes through this building is a point where controls either hold or fail. I did not want another awareness programme. I wanted a training that connects anti-corruption mechanisms to the specific stages of budget execution that our officials administer, so that when they return to their desks on Monday morning, they know exactly what to look for and exactly what to do when they find it,” Madein said.

The four-day curriculum was structured around six modules: the nature and impact of public sector corruption on national development, Nigerian anti-corruption legislation, preventive strategies, ethics and codes of conduct, whistleblowing as an institutional responsibility, and behavioral change approaches to sustaining organizational integrity. The final day was devoted to case study reviews using scenarios drawn from government financial operations, group presentations, and certification. EFCC representatives contributed to the sessions on anti-corruption law and preventive strategies, grounding the legal and regulatory modules in the enforcement agency’s operational experience with public sector financial crimes.

Uche Ashiogwu, Deputy Director of Training and Staff Welfare at the OAGF, who coordinated the logistics of the engagement, said the office received 12 formal recommendations from the facilitators at the close of the programme, covering periodic refresher training, the establishment of an internal monitoring mechanism, strengthened whistleblower protections, technology-enabled reporting tools, and a reward system for ethical conduct. “The Accountant General has asked that these recommendations be reviewed for integration into our operational procedures. This is not a one-off event,” Ashiogwu said.

Osedebamen Ihimekpen, CEO of Ayemere & Associates Consults and lead coordinator of the engagement, said the programme’s substantive content was developed by Michael Ogbe, who designed the curriculum around his published research on integrating anti-corruption safeguards with the operational stages of the budget execution cycle. “That research was published as a peer-reviewed article in 2021. What we delivered at Treasury House was its practical application to the specific responsibilities of OAGF officials. In my experience facilitating institutional training programmes across government agencies, it is not common for a programme at this level to be built on original, published scholarly work.

The depth of the participants’ engagement reflected that difference,” Ihimekpen said.
Officials who completed the programme described the training in practical terms. Oladimeji Oloyede Isola said the whistleblowing module reshaped his understanding of reporting obligations. “Before this training, whistleblowing felt like something that applies elsewhere. The session broke it down into specific steps relevant to what we do in this office, the protections that exist under Nigerian law, and the procedures for raising concerns internally. That was new for most of us,” Isola said.

Felix Oyelere Adesoye said the case studies on the final day were the most valuable component. “The scenarios were drawn from government financial operations, not textbook examples. Every module tied back to the controls and processes we manage here at the OAGF. When the EFCC officers described how cases begin, how evidence is gathered from treasury records, and what patterns investigators look for, it connected the training to real consequences. That changed the tone of the room,” Adesoye said.

The OAGF processes the financial transactions of the entire federal government and is the implementing authority for the Treasury Single Account system. The integrity of its internal controls has implications not only for the federal budget but for the confidence of international development partners, whose disbursements to Nigeria are conditioned on the financial management capacity of recipient institutions. Dr. Madein has signalled that the December workshop is the first in a planned series of capacity-building interventions aimed at strengthening anti-corruption compliance across the OAGF’s operations.