Ekpo Nta, the chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission on Sunday, said stealing of public funds by government officials and other public office holders is not corruption.
*ICPC Chairman, Ekpo Nta,
The chairman made the assertion in Abuja, while playing host to a delegation from the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria.
He noted that contrary to popular thinking, most acts credited to corruption have no relationship with stealing.
According to him, most people, including the educated, did not quite understand what constituted corruption and stressed that it was wrong to classify theft as such.
"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" Nta said.
The ICPC chairman went ahead to explain that calling stealing corruption is like the ordinary Nigerian who often called a roadside mechanic an engineer, noting that most contractors often add engineering in their certificates of incorporation and advised COREN to liaise with the Corporate Affairs Commission to correct the anomaly.
Nta disclosed that there are only 23,000 registered engineers in Nigeria, but in practice the country has over 100,000 engineers with quacks being the bulk of it.
Responding, Kashim Ali, COREN's president who led the delegation, explained that the commission's visit was to forge inter-agency partnership against corruption.
According to him, most engineering projects in Nigeria were awarded to non-engineers, which amounted to the outflow of about $63 billion illicit funds going out of Africa yearly.
COREN's president frowned that most government ministries and other public sectors preferred to give engineering contracts to non-engineers, revealing that 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.
"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" he 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" he said.
"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."
"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."
Ali later signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the ICPC in a bid to flush out quacks in the profession.
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