Local governments in Nigeria’s richest oil state routinely steal or misuse public funds instead of using them to improve collapsed schools and health services, Human Rights Watch said in a report published on Wednesday.
The U.S.-based group said the government had failed to curb corruption at state and local levels, resulting in a “shocking and disastrous failure” to provide basic services and aggravating social unrest in Africa’s oil heartland.
The report used case studies from Rivers, Nigeria’s top oil producing state, to show how millions of windfall petrodollars have gone to waste in Africa’s most populous nation, which ranks 159 out of 177 countries in the U.N. Human Development Index.
“One local government chairman habitually deposited his government’s money into his own private bank account. Another has siphoned off money by allocating it towards a ‘football academy’ that he has not built,” the report said.
“Public schools have been left to fall apart and health care facilities lack even the most basic of amenities,” it said, listing schools with collapsed walls, no desks, no books and no chalk, and health centres with no toilets, water, drugs or beds.
Rivers is in the heart of the Niger Delta, which accounts for all oil production from Nigeria, the world’s eighth-biggest exporter of crude. Decades of neglect of its poor communities have resulted in a rising tide of violent crime and militancy.
Armed groups are holding 38 foreigners hostage in the delta, thousands of other expatriates have fled the region in the past 12 months, and a fifth of oil output is shut down because of militant attacks.
WASTED WINDFALL
Human Rights Watch said the Nigerian government had squandered a unique opportunity from high oil revenues to address the deprivation at the root of the violence.
Since its return to civilian rule in 1999, Nigeria’s 36 states and 774 local governments have seen sharp increases in the funds allocated to them under the three-tiered system of government and sharing of revenues.
As an oil-producing state, Rivers receives an extra share of oil revenues which have surged thanks to high oil prices. In 2006, the state budget projected total government spending of $1.3 billion, double the amount Rivers had to spend in 2004.
“Much of this windfall has been lost to the extravagance, waste and corruption that characterise state government spending,” Human Rights Watch said.
It pointed to the 2006 state budget, which gave the governor’s office a $65,000 daily travel allowance and $77 million annually for unspecified “special projects”.
The state’s 23 local government councils, which are responsible for delivering primary health care and education, have seen their monthly revenues rise fourfold since 1999 but there is almost nothing to show for it, the report said.
Local government chairmen use inflated building contracts to generate kickbacks for themselves and contractors and opaque budgets to allocate hefty slices of revenue to themselves. They routinely bill government for services that are not provided.
In Opobo/Nkoro local government area, the chairman’s 2005 travel budget was $53,800, more than twice as large as the capital budget for the health sector. An allocation for “miscellaneous expenses” was bigger than the education budget.
Human Rights Watch said even the small amounts that were left for health and education on paper were in fact stolen as there was no evidence of any spending on those sectors.