The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) says it recovered N13 billion from selected ministries, departments and agencies.
The Secretary to the Commission, Mr. Elvis Oglafa, said this in Abuja yesterday while presenting a paper at a roundtable on the economic transformation agenda of the Federal Government, jointly organized by the Office of the Special Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on Performance Monitoring and Evaluation and the African Institute of Applied Economics.
Oglafa, who identified overdependence on oil as a major challenge in the fight against corruption in the country, said, “The ICPC believes that there is enough evidence of corruption which is an impediment to Nigeria`s development.”
Lamenting over the shortage of funding facing the commission, Oglafa noted that the Independent Commission Against Corruption of Hong Kong (ICAC) “has an average of one investigator to 5,000 people and a budget of $12.30 per/capita to fight corruption while the ICPC has a staff strength of 534 in a nation of about 150 million people and a per capita budget of 0.3 US cents to fight corruption”.
According to him, “the ICPC is happy with the attempt by the National Planning Commission to ensure that all the 36 states of the federation establish Planning Commission and Board of Statistics, which, if accomplished, would create the necessary data that would ensure adequate planning thereby removing the haphazard projects that have become a cesspool of corruption”.