The Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo has stated that the prevention of corruption is better than curing the scourge because recovering of stolen funds is costly.<\/p>\n
He stated this in Lagos\u00a0on Thursday<\/span><\/span>\u00a0night at the 5th Annual Christopher Kolade Lecture on Business Integrity. The event has \u201cPrevention is Better than Cure Even on the Issuee of Corruption\u2019\u2019 as title.<\/p>\n Osinbajo stated that to recover looted funds, \u201cyou need to engage forensic consultants and hire other experts; even then, you will only have some hope of recovering some of what has been lost\u201d.<\/p>\n According to him, \u201cMany countries are reluctant to return proceeds of corruption by introducing legal obstacles of different kinds to ensure that we do not get back the money.<\/p>\n \u201dThere is a long list of \u2018what if\u2019 \u2013 what if we were able to do something or invest even half of that money in economic or infrastructure projects before it disappeared?<\/p>\n \u201dIf some of that money went into boosting our reserves, our exchange rate will not be where it is today; so there lies evidence that corruption is cheaper to prevent than to cure.\u201d<\/p>\n The acting President said that the negative impact of corruption on human lives and development could never be fully reversible.<\/p>\n \u201cIn our investigations into Defence spending, we discovered 15 billion dollars unaccounted for, with no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover it.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can imagine the damage done by that corrupt act,\u2019\u2019 the Acting President said.<\/p>\n He then enjoined Nigerians neither to condone corruption nor celebrate those indulging in it, stressing that \u201ccorruption is the robbery of the wealth of the nation, and thieves exist in every tribe or religion\u201d.<\/p>\n Osinbajo maintained that the Federal Government would continually seek ways to make it harder for government funds to be stolen or diverted.<\/p>\n \u201dPresident Muhammadu Buhari issued an order mandating immediate compliance to the Treasury Single Account system to simplify government accounting to provide a clear picture of what is coming in and going out.<\/p>\n \u201cOver 20, 000 bank accounts have been closed since the presidential order.<\/p>\n \u201cAnother example is the bank verification numbers which modified application to the federal payroll; we have been able to uncover more than 60,000 cases of ghost workers.<\/p>\n \u201dAnother important measure is getting all our armed forces personnel on the electronic human resource payroll to prevent scams in the service,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n The Acting President added that the whistleblower policy was also aimed tackling corruption, pointing out that \u201cthe solution really is to ensure stiffer control to prevent fraud and corruption\u201d.<\/p>\n He assured that the presidency would ensure close working relationship with the judiciary and ensure that the judiciary itself was free of corruption to successfully prevent corruption.<\/p>\n \u201dWe will not succeed in preventing corruption to a significant extent unless the acts of corruption are met with appropriate levels of sanctions and deterrence,\u201d Osinbajo said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo has stated that the prevention of corruption is better than curing the scourge because recovering of stolen funds is costly. He stated this in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exclusive"],"yoast_head":"\n