Govt Officials in MDAs Open 500,000 Bank Accounts to Hide Stolen Funds- Presidency

Nigerian civil servants in federal ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) hid stolen funds belonging to the country in at least 500,000 bank accounts, according to Garba Shehu, media aide to President Muhammadu Buhari.

Shehu claimed that Buhari’s government discovered the bank accounts adding that “His (Buhari’s) administration discovered more than 500,000 bank accounts operated by ministries, agencies and departments. In these accounts, the money belonging to the government was kept”.

The Presidency also revealed that the “agencies went to the banks to borrow money kept by sister agencies at exorbitant interest rates.

“What is more, some of the signatories had left the service or were ‘unknown’, and so no one had access to the funds,” it stated. “MDAs are now compelled to use the Treasury Single Account (TSA), domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria.”

A few weeks ago, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo blamed the civil servants for Nigeria’s underdevelopment.

He said that “Very often, we hear people say that Nigeria’s problem is not plans and policies, but rather that of a lack of implementation,” he noted. “The subtext of such comments is simple: the bureaucracy is the key; if it works, everything works; if it fails, plans and policies are hardly worth the paper they are written on; the bureaucracy literarily holds the future of the nation in its hands.”

According to the Presidency, the civil servants are not the only ones siphoning public funds. It said past presidents and heads of state also pilfered the public coffer except the incumbent who had saved Nigerians from financial doom.

“President Muhammadu Buhari is a leader. He inherited a treasury that had been emptied by successive previous administrations – and he sought and succeeded in repatriating billions of dollars of stolen funds from overseas,” the Presidency added.