A former Minister of State for Finance, Remi Babalola, has revealed that he left the cabinet of former President Goodluck Jonathan, because of gross corruption and mismanagement of the nation’s resources.
Babalola made the disclosure in a paper presented on Tuesday, at the 45th Annual Accountants Conference and 50th Anniversary celebration of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria.
In his paper titled “Achieving the Nigeria of Our Dream: The Responsibility of Professional Accountants,” Babalola urged the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari to pay special attention to corruption.
He said, “Our culture of impunity is the bane of the entrenched corruption in our society. The value destruction and corruption undermine any economic development or social change we may aspire for our nation.
“Mismanagement and misallocation of resources, coupled with an unprecedented level of corruption have been at their highest in the history of our nation in the last six years.
“Performance or success in public space was measured by the conversion rate of public funds into private accounts. It looks as if democracy has been substituted with kleptocracy.”
“I was unperturbed and unruffled but ready and willing to take a walk as a statement of intent that if they wanted to continue in that decadence of resource mismanagement, I was not going to be a part of it.”
“It is counter intuitive that we deliberately ensure that receipts and proceeds into the nation’s treasury are not accounted for.
“Such has been our contempt for process transparency that an incumbent governor of an operationally and legally independent central bank, who publicly alerted the nation, was forced out of a fixed tenure.
“Of course given its systemic importance to the economy, there is no justification for the state-owned oil sector monopoly (the NNPC) not to publicly publish its audited accounts and even quarterly accounts like all listed companies on the stock exchange.”
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