Rev. Canon Samuel Ope, a retired Assistant Comptroller General and Head of Internal Audit, Nigeria Customs Service, in this interview with ADEOLA BALOGUN, shares his life experiences
How do you feel at 70?
I feel really good; and looking back, I thank the Almighty for what he has done in my life and what he has made me to be. God has helped me greatly at various capacities where I worked during my years in the civil service and in the vineyard after my retirement. I cannot thank Him enough for showing me mercy, especially now that I am the head of the family in Odoselu Alaro, Ijebu where I was born.
After retirement from service, what have you been doing?
After I retired as an Assistant Comptroller General and Head of Internal Audit of the Nigeria Customs Service in 1999, I joined the ordained ministry after training as a priest in the seminary. Right now, I am the Vicar of St. Philips Anglican Church, Oke Popo, Lagos Island and I have been there for 10 years now. I give God the glory.
Did you grow up in Lagos?
No, I didn’t grow up in Lagos. I was born and bred in Ijebu where I had my primary school education. I stayed with my grandmother because my father who was a nurse was being transferred from one place to another. I attended Isonyin Grammar School which was very close to my town and later moved to Lagos. I have since been in Lagos except when I travelled overseas.
Was it your dream when you were in school to join the Customs service?
No. In fact, when I was at Isonyin Grammar School, I happened to be seen as one of the most brilliant students in the school. Then, you were either thinking of becoming a medical doctor, an engineer, lawyer or even the principal of a school. And because I was very good at Latin, people believed I was going to read Classics and eventually become a principal of a school or a medical doctor. The idea of becoming a medical doctor became obscure because at that time, my school was new. We didn’t have science laboratories and so we didn’t offer science subjects. But then after school, we thought of going to an emergency science school at Onikan, Lagos at that time, to go and study science subjects to be able to train as medical doctors. Being a brilliant student, people thought I was going to be a doctor; in fact in my books in the school, people who were anticipating that I would train as a doctor had already been writing Dr. Ope as my name, even though I didn’t offer science subjects. Then, I never knew anything called accountancy or customs service. By the time we got to the emergency science school in March 1963, I was offered admission but the letter did not get to me on time. I decided to wait till September which was the time people travel overseas for further studies. But in May, I just felt I should not sit idle in the house until September, so I went to the Labour Office because it was so easy to get jobs at that time once you had your labour card. As soon as I got to the Ikoyi office of Labour, I was asked to go to the Ministry of Works on my birthday, May 11. As soon as I got there, I was given an appointment. It was a Saturday and the officer who took us in told us to come back the following Monday, which was to be 13th. That was how I started work on May 13, 1963 and I never knew it was going to be a major change in my life.
When did you then leave for the Customs?
When I came in, I met someone, Mr. Yusuf, who was ahead of me as a second class clerk while I came in as a third class clerk. We were paired to work in the store and as we were working, I saw that he was reading. When I asked what he was reading, he said he was reading accounting, which I found very strange. Then I told him to tell me more about it and there and then, I applied. But he said I should take some lessons from the Chartered Institute of Secretaries before any other thing. It was so nice at that time, if you applied for anything, within two weeks, you got a reply. So, I applied to the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators in England and they replied me immediately; I started the exams until I qualified. I had some in-service training sponsored by the government of this country and I read Executive Management Accountancy at the University of Lagos and I also did Advanced Financial Management at the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria in Badagry. At the time, we were in the pool and being an accountant, I was a treasury officer. I was moved from ministry to ministry starting from the Ministry of Works. I was taken from there to the Ministry of Finance and then to the Ministry of Defence and the Nigeria Police where I spent eight years in the Force Headquarters. And from there, I was moved to the office of the Head of Service where I was put in charge of pension accounts. From pension accounts, I moved to the Customs Service as the Chief Internal Auditor; that was in 1984 and from there, I moved to the Ministry of Internal Affairs as an Assistant Director and Head of Internal Audit. Eventually, when the NCS was taken out of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and was no longer a department, I was moved to NCS as Assistant Comptroller General.
So, you didn’t deliberately get enlisted in the service?
I was being moved around and I ended up at NCS. Of course when I got there, I was trained in paramilitary because we had to wear a uniform. At the time, NCS was just a department in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Finance until it became a paramilitary service. When I was moving from the Nigeria Police Force, I had just spent two years at the office of the Head of Service as Head of the Pension Accounts when I was told to go to New York and iron out certain problems in the accounts of the missions. When my CV was sent to the Minister of Finance then, Chief Onaolapo Soleye, he said I would be a good material for the internal audit of the NCS and I should be sent there. That was how I found myself there. Ordinarily, the rule at that time was that you should spend at least four years but I spent just two years. And when I moved there, I knew he thought right because the internal audit of the NCS that I met was nothing to write home about.
People have always seen the NCS as a corrupt service; so what did you meet there?
I would say that corruption has eaten very deep into the Nigerian system. There are many organisations now that are worse than NCS and even the police but you would not know. In those days when it was reported that some people were making a lot of money from the NYSC, people were wondering how it was possible. When I got to NCS, it was not as if corruption was embedded in the system but that the internal audit there was not well organised. I saw that instead of being a separate unit responsible directly to the accounting officer, it was being manipulated and one particular department of the NCS was seeing itself as being in charge, which should not be. The internal audit should only be responsible directly to the head like the minister. Apart from internal audit unit, the public relations unit and the legal unit should also be responsible directly to the accounting officer or the minister or the comptroller general as the case may be. But then, I found out that Inspection and Investigation was seeing itself as in charge of the audit and was claiming that the audit must report to that department. Unfortunately, the director of customs at that time who did not know the nitty gritty, thought they were right and this was the greatest challenge for me to be able to right the wrong. It took me a lot of time and as it is natural, the man there thought I came to take over his job but I tried to explain to them. I first of all presented a paper on the need to straighten things up and as time went by, the man saw me as a friend. I think one weapon that I used to win people over was humility.
People too see accountants are people who can manipulate when it comes to financial issues.
If you really know the duty of your calling as an accountant and you are professionally qualified, you will not think of manipulating anything because you have a name to protect and you also have the professional body watching. If in the process of manipulating, you get caught and your licence is seized, that will be the end professionally. In fact, when you are well qualified, it will not even dawn on you to manipulate anything; you want to do the correct thing all the time.
As an accountant in the service, were you at anytime tempted to help yourself to a lump sum?
Yes certainly. My first posting when I qualified as a chartered secretary/administrator was to be given the post of Paymaster General at the Ministry of Works. At that time, I had 19 paymasters under me and we were paying all workers in the ministry nationwide, and it was that time that we changed from pounds to naira and kobo. And because it was a new dispensation, there were a lot of mistakes in the process of conversion. So, at the time we finished payment to all the beneficiaries, I discovered that I had over N3m with me. What I did immediately was to return the money to the treasury. In fact, there were people then who called me a fool for returning the money. They were angry why I could do that instead of helping myself to some of it. Due to my Christian upbringing, I wouldn’t take anybody’s money; I paid it in and accounted for it. I instituted very stiff control measures such that it was not possible for anybody to take away a kobo from the money that was given out for the payment of salary at that time. That is why I am amazed now that somebody made away with N26bn pension funds. I begin to wonder how he made it. It shows that there is no control measure, the type we used to have in those days. There is financial regulation, which has made provision for how you take care of government funds. People now talk of ghost workers; how can you have ghost workers? It means that the control measures that used to be are no longer there. For example, in the payment of salaries, you have a designated officer who is called a variation control officer. He must be of reasonable level and at that time not less than an executive officer, accounts. Then you have the payroll officers who prepare the payroll based on information they received from the administrative sections independent of the variation control officer. These payroll officers then send their payrolls to the variation control officer who already has his own figures. The figures from the payroll officers must agree with his own figure, which he had in his drawers which are under lock and key. Let’s say Group A got a total of N2m last month, all things being equal, the variation control officer would not expect anything more than N2m in the coming month. So if the payroll officers submit N2.1m, the variation control officer would have to return it to them to sort out. So if they still return the same thing, he would call them to explain how they came about the N100,000. Either there was an increase in salary or another person had been employed, otherwise, it should be N2m. Unless they are able to iron that out, the variation control officer would not pass that payroll for payment. But I understand now they just do things anyhow.
Are you saying that during your own time, there was nothing like ghost workers?
It is not that there were none; you would always have people who are either incompetent or dishonest. For example, if the variation control officer who should be of impeccable character, decides to team up with the payroll officers, there can be fraud. But then, this type of fraud would be detected because they would fight among themselves and they would spill the beans. But it was not rampant then because the civil service job was noble. People were contented and even at that time when the issue of 10 per cent on contracts awarded crept in, people dared not be seen engaged in it. But nowadays, I understand it is paid and received in the open and upfront and the person awarding the contracts would have added several millions. At the end of the day, the job would not even be done. It would not happen in those days because people were proud to be civil servants and honest with their jobs.
How did you buy your first car as a civil servant?
I bought my first car in 1970; it was a Volkswagen Beetle 1302 and I got it at Mandilas for £1,140,2 shillings, including the number plate. Before I went to Mandilas, there were about three or four companies that were coming to me. They wanted me to buy a Ford Lada but I went for the beetle. They just gave me the profoma invoice which I attached to my application to the ministry and which was processed. The process was completed in one month and that was the day I went for the car. The Mandilas people were impressed that they gave me back £200 and I used that to buy a 20’ inch television set for £126 at Petraco on the Apapa railway crossing. I took both the car and television home same day.
So it was not that you bought cash?
No, it was through a loan and they were deducting £18 monthly. As I was entitled to a car loan, I was paid £18. Things were really very good at that time and I think I was paying £18 for a flat at that time.
If you had bought the car in cash as a civil servant, what would have happened?
There was no way I would have bought it and I would have been satisfied because the transport system was easy. At that time, if you amassed wealth and you went to your village, people would ask you where you got the money. It was your father that would first ask you where you got money; you gave him money, he would not take from you. But nobody asks questions anymore and they would even make you a chief. And it is a shame that people now see the civil service as a place to amass wealth. Each time I look back at the civil service that I served and the civil service now, I really feel bad about what is going on.
But before you left, things had begun to go down. So, when would you say the problem started?
The decline started the moment the military took over the reins of government, particularly when they started to retire well paid civil servants, permanent secretaries. The civil service was noted for security of tenure. You knew that at the end of the day, you would retire well. At a time, people would resign from banks to join the civil service because of job security. But when the military came and started to retire civil servants, things started to nosedive. Some highly placed civil servants would be on their way to work and would hear from the radio that they had been retired with immediate effect. It was really humiliating and demoralising. The military started to put wrong people in place, using Federal Character. But the truth of the matter is that they were putting round pegs in square holes. Those who took over started to help themselves because they feared that what happened to people before them could happen to them also. That is what I suspect started this corruption thing in the society. I believe that the high rate of corruption in this country is just a symptom that there is a problem. Corruption is not really the problem, we should work to find out what is causing corruption. If you like, set up 10 EFCCs, the problem will remain with us. Unless the problem of what is causing corruption is sorted out, we may not achieve anything. Let the government go back to see how it can restructure the civil service. Unless the civil service is seen as a service to serve the people, without any hindrance, corruption will continue to remain with us. A country with a bad civil service cannot work. That is why it is possible for someone to walk away with N26bn.
You also worked in the pension office. Was it possible to manipulate things?
It was not possible at that time. In fact there was no need to go about in the name of verification and you didn’t hear of people dying on the queue. It was not possible because there were a lot of control measures in place. When someone retired, his name was removed from the payroll immediately and gazetted. Where is the gazette now? I think government should go back to the basics so that there is efficiency in the performance of duties.
Did you burst any fraud while serving in your various posts?
As I told you, once you have tight control, it would be very difficult for people to act funny under or around you. For example, when I was made Paymaster General, one of my officers was trying to play clever. He took N16, which was a lot of money at that time, and kept it and he came to me to say that he couldn’t balance the account. I checked my books and I knew that the money I gave him was correct. I was able to know the particulars of the currencies of the N16. I called him (I won’t mention his name) and others and said, ‘You have stolen N16 and I know you have it in your pocket. I don’t want to spoil your career, I would have called my police orderly to arrest you now. Return it and don’t do so again’. He just prostrated and thanked me and for the five years I was the Paymaster General in the ministry, no one ever behaved funny near me. Some of them even thought I was using juju to get them but it was not so. It was mere control. When I was at the office of the head of service in charge of pension, some people came to forge my signature; my clerk who was writing the cheques was approached but he was too afraid to cooperate with him even when he was promised N25,000 to give them a cheque leaf. He told me later that there was no way I would not discover him if he gave the cheque out; and that if I caught him, he would have gone to jail.
How did you meet your wife?
I met her when I was a prefect in secondary school. She happened to be a relative of a boy in whom I took interest. The day she came to our school on her bicycle and I saw her, I discovered that she came to see the boy and I then wrote a letter and sent it through the boy. But as women would do, she refused to reply. I kept on trying until she responded and that was how we started. Today we are best of friends and our children are doing fine in their respective fields.