President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered a complete audit of all revenue-generating agencies in the country as a clean up measure and to make them more efficient.
Top on the list of the agencies are the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
At his first Independence Day nationwide broadcast on Thursday, the President said the probe of the revenue generating agencies, including the CBN, became necessary following noticeable widespread corruption in the agencies.
“Preliminary steps have been taken to sanitize NNPC and improve its operations so that the inefficiency and corruption could be reduced to a minimum,” Buhari said.
“Those of our refineries which can be serviced and brought back into partial production would be enabled to resume operations so that the whole sordid business of exporting crude and importing finished products in dubious transactions could be stopped.
“In addition to NNPC, I have ordered for a complete audit of our other revenue generating agencies mainly CBN, FIRS, Customs and NCC for better service delivery to the nation.
“Prudent housekeeping is needed now more than ever in view of the sharp decline in world market oil prices. It is a challenge we have to face squarely. But what counts is not so much what accrues but how we manage our resources that is important.
“We have seen in the last few years how huge resources were mismanaged, squandered and wasted. The new APC government is embarking on a clean up, introducing prudence and probity in public financing,” the President said.
He said at the inception of his administration in May, a number of problems were inherited and that he was aware that Nigerians wanted quick solutions not the resolution of the problems.
Copyright Ships & Ports Ltd. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit given to www.shipsandports.com.ng as the source.