Caught in the act
How are the mighty fallen! That is perhaps an apt summary of the story of Umaru Mohammed, the two-star general found guilty of stealing by the Nigerian Army special court martial which sat in Abuja, Tuesday, last week. By the terms of his conviction, the former Group Managing Director, Nigerian Army Properties Limited (NAPL), will have to spend seven years behind bars in addition to paying back various sums totalling N3.7bn that he misappropriated, to the NAPL.
Initially arraigned on 18 counts bordering on forgery, misappropriation of funds, and conspiracy, among others, the court martial had found him guilty on 14 of the counts.
Without prejudice to his rights to pursue the option of appeal, at issue here is the abuse of trust by an individual primarily charged with the performance of a public duty. A case of someone who, merely by his military rank ought to be an exemplar in discipline, probity and inscrutable integrity for which the military establishment is known, found to have engaged in disreputable conduct. It is shameful as it is regrettable.
Unfortunately, while conducts like those of the convicted Maj. Gen. Mohammed continues to tar the image of the military institution with the brush, the truth is that his story is only one out of the many that have oozed out of the military in recent years. An earlier one, just as embarrassing as the current case, involved the General Officer Commanding 8 Division, Sokoto, Major Gen Hakeem Oladapo Otiki. He was said to have sent five soldiers in his detail to haul some cash from Sokoto to Abuja via Kaduna, only for the escorts to disappear with the cash. That was in 2019. Different accounts put the amount involved as ranging from N400 million to N800 million cash.
A subsequent court martial which sat in 2020 found him guilty on a five-count charge and so was recommended for dismissal “with disgrace and dishonour”. He was in addition, required to refund various sums totalling N135.8million, $6,600 to the coffers of the Nigerian Army.
Most celebrated of them all is the now infamous Dasuki-gate involving billions of dollars of funds earmarked for defence spending that were either stolen outright or diverted for purposes other than for which they were meant. While the alleged prime actor was Col Sambo Dasuki, the National Security Adviser under the Goodluck Jonathan administration, service chiefs, the other notable star casts were Alex Sabundu Badeh, a former chief of defence staff, and the former chief of air staff, Adesola Nunayon Amosu.
Clearly, if the singular running thread in all of the cases of financial malfeasance is the greed of a few, its obverse side must be the relative ease with which the systems are subverted such that huge sums can be plundered without triggering any alarms. For, even if the greed factor is sometimes inevitable, what about those controls designed to ensure that abuses of financial regulations cannot escape undetected? Or are we to assume that the military establishment does not have such systems in place?
Military or not; which system that would allow millions of dollars of public funds to be taken out of the vaults by an individual without some layers of checks? Is it something that the financial guidelines of the military permit? If not, how could such breaches have gone on undetected to such a point that billions would be involved?
While the military authorities ponder on these, it seems to us that the starting point in the journey to correction is for the military as an institution to overhaul its accounting infrastructure. In the circumstance, a new system of financial controls with multiple layers of triggers has become an imperative. There is at the moment still too much haemorrhaging of public funds going on at different levels of the military. The situation calls for drastic action.
In the meantime, we urge the government to recover every kobo that has been stolen.
