Nigeria’s Supreme Court spent over N12 billion in breach of financial regulations for five years, the latest audit report of the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation (OAuGF) has revealed.
The funds should be recovered and remitted to the Treasury by the Chief Registrar of the Court, as the audit report, released in December 2023, recommended.
The report essentially covers the expenditures and finances of ministries, departments, and agencies of the federal government for the 2020 fiscal year, but for the Supreme Court, it stretches forward and backwards to touch on some major payments and transactions executed from 2017 to 2021.
The current Chief Registrar of the Supreme Court, Hajo Sarki-Bello, assumed office in 2021, a year after the alleged infractions took place under Hadizatu Uwani-Mustapha.
Walter Onnoghen, who was the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) between 2016 and 2019, and his successor, Tanko Muhammad, who was CJN between 2019 and 2022, oversaw the Supreme Court during the period of the controversial payments and transactions spotlighted by Nigeria’s auditor general.
Muhammad abruptly resigned from office, citing health issues, in June 2022, amid a raging, unprecedented protest from his colleague justices of the Supreme Court about his handling of the finances and other affairs of the court at the time.
Highlights of the issues raised concerning the transactions totaling N12.335 billion in the 2020 audit report include payments for contracts without budgetary provisions, diversion of government assets for private use, inflation of contract prices, irregular award of contracts, and overpayment to contractors, among others.
Funds budgeted for broadcast equipment unaccounted for
In one of the key violations of extant regulations, the report revealed that the Supreme Court appropriated and received the sum of N645 million for the procurement of broadcast equipment in 2017.
However, the court failed to produce “relevant documents such as vouchers, vote books, store receipt vouchers, store ledgers, and invoices” for the audit.
Following the silence of the court to provide any explanation for its failure to tender the documents, the audit report attributed the “anomalies” to “weaknesses in the internal control system at the Supreme Court.”
Also, the report said, contrary to constitutional provisions and financial regulations, the court funnelled over N10.223 billion through 124 vouchers to “various beneficiaries” in 2020. But the paid vouchers and other supporting documents were not presented for audit, the report said.
Citing a case of irregular award of contract and overpayment to a contractor, the report requested the Chief Registrar justify the sum of N826.75 million to the National Assembly.
Narrating the circumstances around the issue of overpayment to a contractor, the report revealed that a contract was awarded for the construction of an access road to justices’ quarters (Yellow Houses) in Abuja in April 2021, the twilight of Uwani-Mustapha’s exit from the Supreme Court.
The contract was awarded at the cost of N990 million (N990,494,207.80 in total). The level of work done was valued at 50 percent, which should have amounted to N495 million (N495,247,103.90).
But “the contractor was paid N827 million (N827,075,713.04 in total), which was 83.5 percent of the contract sum, resulting in an overpayment of N331,815,559.61,” the report said, adding that the court offered no explanation for the violation.
In another instance, the court awarded contracts totaling N371.5 million (N371,541,636 in total) for supplies, works, and services in 2017 without budgetary provisions.
Unauthorised sale of landed properties
The report also uncovered the sale of four landed properties belonging to the court in Lagos.
The plots of land located at 72 Alexander Avenue, 2 Club Road, 20 Cameron Road, and 15 Ikoyi Crescent, all in Abuja, were “disposed of without following due process.”
It added that “evidence of the disposal, such as authorisation, report from the board of survey, the engagement of auctioneers, advertisements, and proceeds from disposal, among others, were not produced for audit.”
In a case of illegal possession of government property, the report said the Supreme Court paid over N3 billion for 45 vehicles between the 2017 and 2021 fiscal years.
Giving details of the vehicle purchase, the report disclosed that 18 of the 45 vehicles costing over N515 million were attached to seven justices of the Supreme Court for official use.
But after the justices retired from the court, the official cars attached to them were not returned for inspection, a scenario the report described as “diversion of government assets for private use.”
Court’s response
In the myriad of violations detailed by the audit report, the court management responded to the issue of justices’ retirement with official vehicles attached to them. “The vehicles are part of Supreme Court justices’ entitlements,” the court responded in the report.
But it kept mum on other egregious violations in the report.
How opacity breeds corruption in Nigerian judiciary’s finances
Lawyers and anti-corruption activists have questioned the illegality of the National Judicial Council’s (NJC) concealing the judiciary’s budget details from public scrutiny, even sometimes doing so in resistance to Freedom of Information requests.
The extent of NJC’s desperation to keep details of its finances away from the public became clearer in 2022, when the then Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, challenged it to open its budget for the sake of transparency.
Amid the secrecy of the budgets and finances of the judiciary, which the NJC helps to sustain, allegations of corruption and mismanagement of funds, sometimes coming from highly placed insiders, hover over the judiciary.
In May 2022, a retiring Justice of the Supreme Court, Ejembi Eko, in his valedictory speech, lamented the corruption in the handling of the finances of the judiciary.
He, therefore, called on anti-graft agencies to probe the financial records of the judiciary.
“Nothing stops the office of the Auditor-General of the Federation, the ICPC, and other investigatory agencies from opening the books of the judiciary to expose the corruption in the management of their budgetary resources,” Eko said.
“That does not compromise the independence of the judiciary. Rather, it promotes accountability.”
It would take just a month after Eko’s invitation to the anti-corruption agencies to probe the finances of the judiciary for internal rumblings about corruption and suspicions of financial mismanagement within the Supreme Court to implode.
In June 2022, in an unprecedented protest letter to then CJN Tanko Muhammad, 14 Justices of the Supreme Court demanded “to know what has become of our training funds” and asked rhetorically, “Have they been diverted, or is it a plain denial?”
Later that year, in September, one of the justices who authored the protest letter, Abdu Aboki, took advantage of his valedictory speech while retiring from the Supreme Court bench to press for financial transparency and accountability in the judiciary.
Under the part of his valedictory speech that he sub-titled, ‘My valedictory messages to the nation and judiciary in particular,’ Aboki called on “those in charge of administering the funds allocated to the judiciary” in Nigeria “to be prudent, transparent, and accountable.”
In a more direct and critical tone, another Justice of the Supreme Court, Dattijo Muhammad, while retiring as the second most senior justice of the court in October 2023, alleged widespread corruption in the Nigerian Supreme Court and down the hierarchy of the judiciary.
Muhammad was one of the 14 Supreme Court justices who authored the protest letter sent to then CJN, Tanko Muhammad, in June 2022. But as of the time of Dattijo Muhammad’s retirement in October last year, Olukayode Ariwoola, who led the pack of the 14 protesting justices more than a year earlier, had taken over from Tanko Muhammad as the CJN.
Turning on the handlers of the funds allocated to the judiciary in his valedictory speech last October, Dattijo Muhammad said that despite the “phenomenal” increase in the judiciary’s budgets over the years, there had been no commensurate improvement in the welfare of judges.
He similarly called for a probe of the judiciary’s handling of its funds.
He said, “Unrelenting searchlights need to be beamed to unravel how the sums are expended.”
Auditor-general demands refund, proof, amid poor enforcement
With the Supreme Court’s silence over the infractions highlighted in the latest audit report, Nigeria’s auditor-general’s office requested the chief registrar to account for, recover, and remit the funds into the federation’s account.
It specifically asked the chief registrar to show proof of compliance with the recommendations to the Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly.
But this is not the first time the office of the Auditor-General of the Federation has indicted ministries, departments, and agencies of government for serious violations of financial regulations.
But the recommendations of the audit reports are never implemented by the National Assembly or taken up by Nigeria’s law enforcement agencies, a development that has emboldened public institutions to perpetrate grand corruption in the form of diversion of public funds.