CBN – Clearing The Shelves

THE House of Representatives committee querying the Central Bank of Nigeria’s N2.8 billion expenditure on the renovation of its Port Harcourt branch is in a testy situation. The CBN would not produce documents to support the expenditure!

Audit query of about N4.7bn expenditure has been raised by Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation. CBN was not impressed. The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Representatives took up the matter, laying particular emphasis on how the renovation of CBN’s Port Harcourt branch cost N2.8bn.

Committee chairman Mr. Solomon Olamilekan said the cost of re-doing the Port Harcourt branch was an example of the extravagant expenditures of CBN. Olamilekan told CBN officials that without documents to support the expenditures they would be “giving indication that due process was not followed.”

Other expenditures the committee queried were N23m spent on renovating the CBN governor’s residence and a separate N50m quoted for the same purpose. Dates for the works, said to have stretched over “several years”, were not stated.

More baffling is that CBN bought a property worth N848m for the National Planning Commission. It did not have the transaction agreements. Things got more interesting when the committee gave CBN two days to produce documents on the spending.

Deputy Governor, Corporate Services, CBN, Mr. Suleiman Barau said, “I was not in office when all this happened. I am only defending the institution.” He was the first to give a hint that there were no documents. As if he was not explicit enough, the next speaker told the committee that the matter was dead.

“Many of the documents might be difficult to trace because the bank usually cleared its shelves every five years,” CBN Director of Procurement, Mr. I. O. Gbadamosi said. His logic was simple – nobody should punish CBN officials over matters that its regulations permitted.

CBN is under the law which says the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation should scrutinise its accounts. Section 85 (4) of the Constitution states, “The Auditor-General shall have power to conduct checks of all government statutory corporations, commissions, authorities, agencies, including all persons and bodies established by an Act of the National Assembly.”

The committee in insisting that CBN had to produce the documents or the funds should be refunded to the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation would cut CBN’s acclaimed independence under which it is unwilling to allow the law vet its budget and processes. Its understanding of independence is that it is placed above the law in its activities. It is the duties of the National Assembly through oversight functions to protect the public from its institutions. CBN should account for expending public resources.