When the audit team from the Office of the Auditor-General for the Federation walked into the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control in August 2020, the country was five months into the pandemic and the centre stood at the heart of the national response. On the centre’s own books, the auditors found N486,297,966.20 in cash advances paid out to members of staff that had not been accounted for or retired as at the day of that visit.
The unretired advances are one of seven audit queries raised against the centre in the interim report of the special audit of the Federal Government response to COVID-19, signed by Anthony M. Ayine, Auditor-General for the Federation, after his team examined transactions of N2,201,126,060.48 executed between March and June 2020. Every one of the seven arose under Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, who had led the agency since 2016 and remained its Director-General throughout the period the auditors examined.
The auditors also found that the centre spent N38,117,257.52 of its COVID-19 funds on projects that had been initiated in 2018 and 2019, projects the report states were unrelated to COVID-19.
The largest single query concerns procurement. The centre spent N1,147,891,839.87 on goods and services and recorded none of it on the Nigeria Open Contracting Portal, as the guidelines of the Bureau of Public Procurement and the Public Procurement Act 2007 require, including under emergency procurement, which must still be published for post-review by the Bureau. The auditors recorded the risk in the report’s own words as the “possibility of collusion in procurement process”. The report names no supplier and no contract in connection with the money.
In a separate finding, the centre handed N118,864,813.20 to members of staff in cash to make purchases, using cash advances in place of the local purchase orders and job orders through which such buying is required to pass, contrary to Financial Regulation 2302(ii).
The centre also paid N233,200,000 to staff as special allowances from the COVID-19 funds without the approval of the Head of Service or of the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission, and the report records that no retrospective approval was obtained either.
A further N100,001,970 was recorded as salaries and allowances for ad-hoc staff. The centre produced no names, no letters of engagement or appointment, no record of any service rendered and no amount paid to any individual, and the report states the risk in its own words: “Possibility of payment to ghost workers.”
Donated items that passed through the centre produced the same blank. The centre paid N19,257,650.74 to staff for the shipment, clearing and distribution of donated items, yet kept no record of who donated them, what was donated or who received them, and the report states that the total value of the donated items is unknown.
The report’s own figures do not reconcile with one another. Its summary total for the centre does not tally with the sum of the seven findings it lists, and elsewhere in the document its totals disagree by sums running as small as N88,000.
The centre was not the only office the interim report caught. The Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, chaired by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, was allocated N22,163,130,411 and had spent N191,984,364 of it by 30 June 2020, one per cent. A further N4.5 billion released for the task force’s own operations and N17.6 billion released for participating agencies also went unspent, for reasons the report left “as yet unclear”.
At the warehouse of the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development at Idu in Abuja, the ministry Sadiya Umar Farouq heads, the auditors found palliatives rotting in store while relief items left the warehouse without adequate records.
The interim report was phase one of a three-phase special audit, and in October 2020 the Auditor-General announced that further reports would follow quarterly. No second or third phase has ever been published. A SecretsReporters examination of the public record traces no retirement of the advances, no recovery and no sanction arising from the seven queries. Ihekweazu left the agency in 2021 to take up an appointment with the World Health Organization.
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