AN ANALYSIS OF POLICE PENSION FRAUD AND THE FUTURE OF PENSION ADMINISTRATION IN NIGERIA

摘要

Corruption in Nigeria has festered and irredeemably so due in part to the virtual non-existence of institutional mechanisms for ensuring that the machinery of governance and public administration are not unduly distorted or diverted to the satisfaction of egotistical and parochial interests. Nigeria’s public service is saddled with a bureaucratic arrangement that is notoriously over- bloated, yet it is always easy for particular officials or civil servants to hijack the paraphernalia of public service and deploy same in the service of amoral designs. The just concluded probe by the Nigerian Senate on the mismanagement of the police pension funds is one incident out of numerous cases which exemplifies this odious phenomenon. The leadership newspaper captures it as follows: “At last count the amount said to have been stolen amounts to about N156 billion. Perhaps most disturbing was the brazen falsification of documents to withdraw the pension funds that will not get to the beneficiaries.” Illustratively, there was a situation where the Senate probe committee heard how officials of the Police Pension Board falsified documents to withdraw N24 billion from the budget office for the payment of pension that required only N3.5 billion. One does not require any further elaboration to prove that Nigeria, as a social entity, has lost its soul. For when a society degenerates to the level where public officials cultivate sadistic delight in stealing death benefits of retirees, such officials will also harbour no reservations about stealing the buried coffins of dead bodies. This paper examines the police pension scam that was investigated by the Nigerian Senate. It explores the background information to the scam, the investigations and findings. The paper concludes by positing that the scam is a blatant indication of the porosity of the county’s institutions and the weakness of its statutory processes for the public officers indicted in the pension probe to have found the latitude to flirt with such stupendous sums of money without any institutional inhibition. Even with the hullabaloo being made by Sanusi’s CBN about the all-important requirement of lodgement disclosures in the new banking reform, it is curious that debauched public officers could launder and divert public funds into private accounts without being dictated and halted.