Osinbajo, NNPC, fraud investigators seek paradigm shift in fight against corruption

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has urged greater collaboration among government agencies and interest groups in Nigeria’s fight against corruption.

He also said that a new national re-orientation and attitudinal change would be required to effectively tackle the menace.

Osinbajo stated this yesterday at an anti-corruption summit organised by the Office of the Vice President and the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC) in Abuja.

He said corruption, which is the nation’s most devastating problem for many years, had continued to hinder development.

In the same vein, Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and members of the Chartered Institute of Forensic and Investigative Auditors of Nigeria (CIFIAN) have called for a paradigm shift in the fight against corruption in Nigeria.

Baru, who spoke yesterday during a courtesy visit by members of CIFIAN to the NNPC in Abuja, said preventive measures remained critical to fighting fraud and corruption in Nigeria.

He said the preventive measures, recently deployed by the state-oil-firm to secure buy-in of members of staff on strategies to tame corruption in the company, had enabled one of its subsidiaries, Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), to save over $1.6 billion.

The NNPC GMD, who was equally awarded with CIFIAN’s honourary fellowship and patron of the association, insisted that sanity had returned to the operations of the national oil company.

“There is a lot of sanity. Recently, we are able to get an Atlantic company to return $1.6 billion to NPDC through arbitration process,” he said.

He said the development was only possible because the company prioritised forensic and investigative methods in fighting corruption, stressing that there was need to support the activities of CIFIAN to train enough forensic and investigative auditors in the fight against fraud and corruption.

However, Protem President, CIFIAN, Dr. Victoria Enape, said that Nigeria might not get desired results from the fight against corruption until there is a paradigm shift in the approach of government.

She insisted that fraudsters have gone sophisticated with the use of digital technology to perpetrate fraud, adding that the development has been the reason the association continues to call for a shift through forensic experts.

Enape, who stated that the increasing spate of migration, especially by Nigerian youths, could be addressed if government uses the right method to fight corruption, said the move by the NNPC to track smuggling of petroleum products, in partnership with the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), Customs and other anti-corruption campaigns, were laudable and must be supported.