Transparency International (TI)
says Nigeria needs a federal legislation outlawing security votes.
Christina Hildrew, TI Africa
programme manager of defence and security unit, made the call on Wednesday in
Abuja at a two-day stakeholders conference.
The conference was organised by
Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) in partnership with TI and
support from European Union.
Security votes are funds that are
disbursed to cover unforeseen security needs in the country. They are usually
at the discretion of public officials, without being subject to independent
audit.
In May, TI released a report
revealing that $670m is spent annually on security votes in Nigeria.
This sum is more than the 2017
budget of the Nigerian army.
Hildrew described security votes
as “corruption-prone security funding mechanisms”.
She called for measures to put in
place for effective oversight structures to monitor confidential security
spending, including procurements.
“Security votes are opaque
corruption-prone security funding mechanisms widely used across Nigeria’s three
tiers of government,” Hildrew said.
“Investigation shows that
estimates of 670 million dollars annually, transacted mostly in cash, were
security vote spending and it is not subjected to legislative oversight or
independent audit because of its substantively secretive nature.
“Yet this veil of secrecy
protects the many officials who misspent security votes, and they channel them
into political activities or embezzle them outright.
“There is a wide issue in the
defence sector which is defence `exceptionalism’, that is, the public allows
defence sector to be unaccountable for what they spend because of national
security issues.
“However, the defence sector
should not be unaccountable to the citizens it is meant to protect.”
Hildrew, therefore, called for
additional legislative oversight of the defence sector, adding that “we think
it is important that parliamentary audit committees and civil societies have a
say on how security spending is decided.”.
Hildrew also canvassed the
establishment of security trust fund at state level to support the phasing out
of security votes.
She said checks and balances need
to be put in the system so as to ensure accountability and transparency of
security expenditure.
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