Nta |
According to the commission, most acts credited
to corruption have no relationship with stealing.
SHOWBIZPLUSng gathered that the ICPC chairman,
Mr. Ekpo Nta, said this when a delegation from the Council for the Regulation
of Engineering in Nigeria visited the commission in Abuja to forge inter-agency
partnership against corruption, recently.
Nta noted that most Nigerians, including the
educated, did not quite understand what constituted corruption and stressed
that it was wrong to classify theft as such.
He said, “Stealing is erroneously reported as
corruption. We must go back to what we were taught at school to show that there
are educated people in Nigeria. We must address issues as we were taught in
school to do.”
The commission’s boss likened the penchant for
referring to theft as corruption to the ordinary Nigerian who often called a
roadside mechanic an engineer.
Nta said almost every contractor often included
engineering in their certificates of incorporation and advised COREN to liaise
with the Corporate Affairs Commission to correct the anomaly.
According to him, there are only 23,000
registered engineers in Nigeria, whereas in practice the country has over
100,000 engineers with quacks being in the majority.
The COREN delegation, led by its president, Mr.
Kashim Ali, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the ICPC in a bid to
flush out quacks in the profession.
COREN said most engineering projects in the
country were given to non-engineers, who were subsequently responsible for the
outflow of much of the $63bn illicit funds out of Africa annually.
Ali lamented that most government ministries and
other public sector establishments preferred to award engineering contracts to
non-engineers.
He said such non-professionals looked for
engineers to do the jobs for them after they must have collected huge amounts
of money that were taken out of the continent.
The COREN president said, “Recently, there was a
report from Oxfam that the illicit funds that go out of Africa every year is
$63bn. When I got that report, I sat down and thought, in the whole of Africa,
which countries even have up to $1bn in terms of revenue a year? I can only
count Angola, South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria.
“So, if you now look at the resources available
to the countries, then substantial amount of this money flows out of Nigeria.
We do also know that more than 80 per cent of our resources are committed to
infrastructure, which are mainly engineering projects, and this means that a
substantial amount of that illicit outflow is from engineering projects.
“If we can restore engineering to engineers, our
projects will be better delivered. The quality of our projects would be far
higher than what we have today. What we have today is a situation where we
manage the resources.”
Punch
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