N2.67bn school feeding funds found in private accounts — ICPC

The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) says the sum of N2.67 billion paid to some federal colleges for school feeding during the COVID-19 lockdown ended up in private bank accounts.

Bolaji Owasanoye, ICPC chairman, made the disclosure in his keynote address at the second national summit on diminishing corruption.

The summit themed, ‘Together Against Corruption and Launch of the National Ethics and Integrity Policy’, was held at the council chambers of the presidential villa, Abuja on Monday.

The federal government had said it spent over N500 million to feed school children during the lockdown.

Owasanoye said under open treasury portal review carried out from January to August 15, out of 268 ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) 72 of them had cumulative infractions of N90 million.

According to him, while 33 MDAs gave explanations that N4.1 billion was transferred to sub-TSA, N4.2 billion paid to individuals had no satisfactory explanations.

“We observed that transfers to sub-TSA was to prevent disbursement from being monitored,” Owasanoye said.

“Nevertheless, we discovered payments to some federal colleges for school feeding in the sum of N2.67 billion during lockdown when the children are not in school, and some of the money ended up in personal accounts. We have commenced investigations into these findings.”

The ICPC chairman said under its 2020 constituency and executive projects tracking initiative, 722 projects with a threshold of N100 million were tracked across 16 states.

He said a number of projects described as ”ongoing” in the budget were found to be new projects that ought to have been excluded so as to enable the government to complete existing projects.

According to Owasanoye, the agency also discovered over N2.5 billion appropriated by a deceased senior civil servant in the ministry of agriculture for himself while in office.

On asset recovery, he said the commission recovered N16 billion from the ministry of agriculture paid into individual accounts for non-official purposes.

He listed other assets recovered in the ministry to include 18 buildings, 12 business premises and 25 plots of land.