The Oxfam in Nigeria has said that beginning in mid-March 2020, three Nigerian billionaires had their wealth increased by $6.9bn while the majority of Nigerians got poorer in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Refineries Photo:Pixabay Concerns have been raised over huge funds being spent on Nigeria’s moribund refineries while generating minimal revenues for the nation. At a workshop yesterday tagged: ‘Open data and advocacy in the Nigeria Extractive sector’, Civil Society Organisations (CSO) urged the executive and legislative arms of government to tighten oversight on the operations of the NNPC and its subsidiaries to ensure efficient and profitable service delivery. The CSOs called for a state of emergency on the nation’s three refineries and a complete overhaul to ensure accountability of their operations. The private sector engagement programme manager at Oxfam, Olumide Ojo, urged Nigerians to awake to the importance of demanding more accountability and transparency from state-owned enterprises.
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Chinwe Umeh-Ujubuonu, BudgIT program manager; and Chinedu Bassey, program manager at Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), released a statement announcing this on Sunday.
The federal government, on December 9, 2019, launched the open treasury portal to increase transparency and accountability in government spending.
A transparency portal and quality assurance and compliance committee were set up in June 2020 to review and resolve issues associated with the platform.
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In its statement, BudgIT said it noticed progress in fiscal accountability on the open treasury portal since the committee was set up.
“Since the committee’s intervention, payments without description have reduced by 50.98 percent from N794,954,335.07 in about 28 transactions in August 2020 to N389,718,618.47 with 24 transactions in January 2021,” the statement read.