By Patrick Dele Cole

I am not going to give Professor Jega a pass mark, he has fallen for the trick. Many Nigerians now employ lets actually count you, your eyes, fingerprints, etc.  Do not worry about people who have studied facial recognition techniques, your PVC will prove once and for all that you cannot cheat a scientifically based system.  It is like accountancy.  All of a sudden the vogue is now forensic accounting. If what Price Waterhouse did  to the account of the NNPC is forensic accounting, then I will rather have the non- forensic one. The non-forensic accounting shook Mr. President, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Mrs Deziani, the Governor of CBN. If I understood what the matter then was, Mr. Sanusi  said the person he had the  right to ask what  happened to our money was Mr. President or Mr. Sanusi said X barrels of oil were sold and the money with him for such sale was short by US$49billion. As at that time, no one knew about this except the principals.  A minute to the Accountant General, the Minister of Petroleum, Finance, Crude Oil Sales Executive Director for an explanation within 48hours should have been the president’s reaction. He should have warned them that he did  not want to see more than 2 pages in their reply. Still at this point the public would have remained ignorant.  If the matters were too technical (I do not see it),  he should  have called  on two officials to give a pre -meeting briefing  with their agreed figures,  all this  should have been settled.

What eventually happened was that the claim  of the CBN Governor was called into question. Maybe rightly so because his subsequent announcement did  not sit well with his original bombast. By then the truth had disappeared into the realms of fantasy. No one knows whether it was  49 billion dollars, 29 billion or 10 billion. These figures were bandied about as if there was little differences between 49, 29, and 10US$ billion.

It was at this point that the forensic audit came into existence. I always assume that when words are added to a perfectly sensible word in finance, it means more money. We have not been able to see the forensic report of Price  Waterhouse. But that company owes us an explanation on what a forensic audit is as opposed to a non-forensic one. In normal parlance, when  the police start taking about forensic, then someone is about to go to jail. People do not do forensic audit for the fun of it. All we are told by Price  Waterhouse is that NNPC owes 1.46 million US dollars to the government of Nigeria.  This raises a number of other issues? Who is NNPC and who is the government of Nigeria? Is there not one Federation of Nigeria Account, as stated in the Constitution?  Why this  duplication  of accounts?  Can the Accountant General and the Auditor General be seized of these  accounts?  It would seem that the Minister of Finance does not know the existence of some of these accounts.

Buhari is angry about the alleged missing 2.8 billion  dollars that Coopers and Lybrant, another high class accountant, mentioned  in an audit  query while he was Minister of Petroleum. Many still believe that episode has not been fully explained even if Buhari swears he knows  nothing about it. But that should encourage him to inquire into the 12 billion dollars or 49 billion  dollars  or indeed any large sums of money that  may be  missing.

He should instruct the  investigators  to write their  report in plain English and not the kind of English Mr Justice Irekefe wrote about the  alleged missing 2.8 billion  dollars.  The language is worse than obtuse.  I did not understand it.
What will he do with the  report  will depend on the answers he gets.  If is to move to clean up the country, then it is a good place to start. It will not cost much.  Some  reports are already in existence; they only need to be translated to normal English for the ordinary Nigerian to understand.

CUSTOMS TO THE RESCUE
Wonders will never cease to happen. In Nigeria we have oil. We are broke because those who run the oil sector  have taken so much bribe that the industry cannot now support itself. We need money.

Up jumps the Customs Service  of Nigeria. The Customs will now be a major source of income for the Federal Government. When I first saw the large phalanx of Custom  officials and the Ministers standing around the Comptroller of Customs, that was when I knew it was not a joke: but is was a bad joke!!!