ABUJA – VICE President Yemi Osinbajo Monday said that the federal government was determined to end massive corruption in the country. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo Prof. Osinbajo who disclosed this at the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Week, at the NAF Conference Centre, Abuja, said government had put several measures in place to ensure transparency and accountability in governance.
The Vice President lamented the waste of resources by the last administration which experienced oil boom, noting, “We have, since we assumed office three years ago, made remarkable progress in pushing the frontiers of transparency and accountability in the Federal Government. “One of the first things that the President did when we took office was to establish the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), to coordinate our reform efforts in this regard.
“We inherited a Treasury Single Account (TSA) system that existed mainly as an idea, without any committed implementation. Since the Presidential Order by President Buhari in August 2015, we have made remarkable progress in expanding the reach of the TSA, so that today, we are almost at 100 percent compliance. “We ought to equally acknowledge that there is a limit to what civil society by itself can accomplish by itself, without building bridges with the public sector that is very often the target of its work. What our experience with OGP in Nigeria has proven, is that it is possible to build a coalition of like-minded reformers drawn from government and non-state actors.
“In addition to joining the OGP, and developing a National Action Plan in 2016, the Federal Government also established a Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA), housed in the Federal Ministry of Finance, to clean up the Federal payroll and pensions systems, across all our Ministries, Departments and Agencies. “PICA’s work in this regard has helped the Federal Government save more than N200 Billion by eliminating ghost workers.
Like the TSA, we are also aggressively expanding the rollout of the Government Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), to ensure that the loopholes that enable payroll fraud are permanently blocked.” Related
Source:Vanguard
