By Doyin Ojosipe
The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) has been charged to put in place a whistleblowing mechanism in order to improve accountability and transparency and also ensure good corporate practice in the ministry.
The call was made on Wednesday, during a whistleblowing sensitization program at the Ministry in Abuja.
The program, which was organised by the African Centre for Media and Information Literacy (AFRICMIL) in collaboration with the Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA), was meant to educate the staff of the ministry on the need to key into the whistleblowing policy of the federal government by using whistleblowing to block leakages and improve government revenue.
In his welcome address, Chido Onumah, Coordinator of AFRICMIL, who was represented by the Organisation’s Senior Program Officer, Godwin Onyeacholem, stated that the sensitization program was also intended to get the support of leaders of the respective Ministries, Departments and Agencies see to the need to create an open, transparent and safe work environment where workers can come up and make disclosures or provide information that will benefit their work places and society.
He said after the sensitisation campaign which will hold in 13 MDAs in Abuja, AFRICMIL would follow up on each MDA to assess the extent of implementation of the whistleblowing policy in their offices.
Addressing the participants during his presentation, Assistant Director at PICA, Johnson Oludare said the culture of silence of Nigerians on the issue of exposing corruption enables the prevalence of corruption and ensuring the lack of development in society.
He said, “when people see wrong things being perpetuated in their workplace, they choose not to say anything believing that when it is also their turn, others would be quiet. Check the hospitals, money meant for developmental purpose are not used for the same purpose.”
Oludare said the level of corruption in the public sector as exposed over time has brought about the urgency in the need to institutionalise the whistleblowing policy in every Ministry, Department and Agency of the country.
In the same vein, one of the resource persons, Godwin Chigbu, a lawyer, who spoke on the importance of confidentiality noted that the concept of whistleblowing was being misunderstood as some whistle-blowers had ignorantly exposed themselves in the past in the process of expressing their satisfaction with what they did.
Chigbu advised that a prospective whistle-blowers should always be quiet about it once they made disclosure to any anti-corruption agency, PICA or s relevant stakeholder like AFRICMIL.
Commenting on the issue of whistleblowing, a staff who preferred not to be mentioned noted that the federal government ought to deal with the enablers of corrupt practices before advising Nigerians to blow the whistle.
The staff complained of meagre salaries paid to workers who are expected to expose corruption.
He added that people will naturally look for a way out to meet their needs as government seemed insensitive to the plight of the people.
“You can never see the name of a director on a controversial voucher. It is people like us they use because we want to eat, my salary is nothing to write home about, know this, I want to have a house, and I want to retire but what you are giving us as a salary is meagre, so we have to look for ways to meet our needs. Government has a lot of work to do; it is the government that is corrupt.”
Another staff of the ministry, who identified as Ojo Michael suggested that corruption could be best eradicated from the bottom advising that whistleblowing should be introduced as a subject in colleges where the young ones are taught the importance of speaking up when they observe wrongdoing around them.
The program was the second in the series of the sensitization activities meant to create awareness in government parastatals and to help begin the process of the institutionalization of the whistleblowing policy in the MDAs.
The program is an activity of the whistleblowing initiative of the AFRICMIL, tagged Corruption Anonymous and supported by the MacArthur Foundation.
