There are a lot of monkey businesses going on in the country. We are regaled with silly, mischievous, or deceitful conducts that simply makes you wonder if we have not lost touch with the rest of the world. There are bizarre stories you hear that are simply unique and special to us.
In the past, we were used to people embezzling money and fraud attributed to human beings. We also had accounts or records units or departments set on fire. Today, the new trend that we hear is that apart from humans, animals also require money to spend or for physiological needs, so they pilfer as well as swallow money. Don’t ask me how that is; it is just where our purported fight against corruption and our evolution as a nation so far, has brought us to.
Last week Monday, Nigerians woke up to another incredulous story by officials of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) that termites ate up volumes of documents containing expenditures worth N17.1 billion.
These documents are said to contain details of spendings by the agency in 2013.
The NSITF management stated this when it appeared before the Senate Public Accounts Committee (SPAC) penultimate Friday. Details of this expenditure and more are contained in the 2018 audit report of the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation (OAuGF).
In the report, which is now being considered by the SPAC, the OAuGF queried the agency for spending billions without appropriate supporting documents.
The management could not, however, justify the spending of the money when it was confronted by the panel.
The OAuGF said the N17.158 billion represented the total amount, transferred by the NSITF from its Skye Bank and First Bank accounts, into various untraceable accounts between January and December 2013. These accounts, it said, belong to individuals and companies.
The report also issued 50 different queries for alleged misappropriation of funds against the agency.
Both past and present management of the agency were summoned by the chairman of the Senate panel, Matthew Urhoghide.
When confronted with the queries from the audit report, no official could give a satisfactory explanation for the spending.
The past management that headed the agency in 2013 told the panel that they left behind the relevant cash vouchers for the transactions.
The agency’s Managing Director from 2010 to 2016, Umar Abubakar, allegedly claimed that he was aware of the query and had no explanations to render since the audit exercise was not carried out during his tenure.
On his part, Adebayo Somefun, who headed the agency from May 2017 to July 2020, insisted that those in the agency’s account section should be able to trace the documents.
But the current Managing Director, Michael Akabogu, said the documents were in the organisation’s possession.
He said “the container the said documents were kept by past management has not only been beaten by rains over the years but even possibly been eaten up by termites. I told the past management officers of the need for them to help us out in answering this query with necessary documents which have not been made available for us.”
Another official of the agency, whose name could not be ascertained, told the panel that the container in question has been under lock and key and abandoned in an isolated area within the premises of the organisation in Abuja.
Recall that in 2018, a sales clerk was suspended after she told auditors that a snake had swallowed N36 million proceeds from sale of scratch cards.
The clerk, Philomena Chieshe, was working at an office for the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) in Benue State.
A representative of JAMB, Fabian Benjamin had said that the employee admitted to the auditors that the snake “swallowed” the missing money.
She admitted that she had the money and kept it in an office safe, but the snake came and swallowed the money, Benjamin explained.
Meanwhile, the snake that consumed that volume of money still managed to escape undetected. The snake also ensured that the entire money (N36 million), was swallowed before it left the office of JAMB and vanished into thin air.
Again, in my country where anything goes, in 2019, a gorilla was accused of swallowing N6.8 million in the Kano Zoological Gardens.
A finance officer in the zoo was quoted as saying the gorilla sneaked into an office and carted away the money before swallowing it.
The managing director of the zoo, Umar Kobo confirmed that the money went missing and that the issue was subjected to investigation by the state government.
What these zoo officials did not tell us was how an animal confined within the premises found its way to the office and back and if there was any x-ray showing the millions in the stomach of the mammal.
Of course, these are child’s play when compared to the level and quantum of embezzlement that go on in the government, especially when these things happen while we fool ourselves with our so-called fight against corruption.
There can be only one reason why people come up with these kinds of outlandish claims because somehow they know that after the initial hysteria that greets the claims, things would return to normal and that will be the end of the story.
It is this lack of willpower to follow these cases to their logical conclusions that makes us the laughing stock of the rest of the world. We must stop this if we want to be taken seriously. We are all agreed that corruption remains the bane of this nation, yet we are not agreed on how best to tackle the hydra-headed monster.
The last time I checked, monkeys do not eat papers nor do snakes so they have no business swallowing naira notes, but as for termites they cannot eat up the entire mass of documents so much so that there cannot be traces left.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, monkey business is a behaviour that is not acceptable or is dishonest. Our fight against corruption is not acceptable and dishonest. A situation where in a society a man is sent to jail without an option of fine or a heavy fine but same society allows for a plea-bargain for another man after returning an infinitesimal portion of his loot to walk away a free man, is dishonest and unacceptable.
Therefore, to build the nation, we must put an end to these silly, mischievous, or deceitful monkey business we call fighting against corruption. People must pay for any infraction whoever they are or irrespective of the office they occupy or the political party or camp they belong; we must not be selective or discriminatory as we currently do.
