12th March, 2020
President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan, has sought the assistance of the United Nations on the repatriation of looted funds back to Nigeria.
Lawan made the appeal on Wednesday when the United Nations Country delegation paid a visit to his office at the National Assembly, Abuja.
The Senate President, while responding to anti-graft concerns raised by the visiting delegation, said that the fight against corruption in Nigeria continued to suffer setbacks as a result of the inability of the federal government to repatriate looted funds stashed away in foreign countries across the world.
According to Lawan, such resources, if at the disposal of government, would go a long way towards addressing critical developmental and infrastructural deficits faced by the nation.
“The head of delegation has raised a lot of issues, and these are important and very relevant issues to us.
“When we fight corruption, we do so within and outside. So much of Nigeria’s resources have been taken out of the country.
“But even when we identify embezzled funds, to get them back to Nigeria is a big deal. And in fact, we are suffering from that for years.
“We have had few occasions when we received some repatriation, but the bulk is still out there.
“We need UN to help us, because the kind of resources that are alleged to have been taken out of Nigeria will make the country a rich country if they are repatriated,” Lawan was quoted in a release by his Special Assistant on Press, Ezrel Tabiowo.
He further lamented that due to unavailability of funds, the Federal Government resorted to obtaining domestic and foreign loans to fund capital projects in the 2020 budget.
Reacting to concerns raised over Nigeria’s rising population, Lawan said, “I believe that if we are able to use our population to build the capacity of our population, Nigeria’s population will be a blessing not a curse or burden.
“It is our inability to provide for capacity building of the population, and addressing health issues and so on that makes Nigeria look like it is in bad shape.”
On Nigeria’s readiness to meet the 2030 deadline for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Senate President said, “from the failures in the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the past, the SDGs will definitely have a better treatment in the country, because our failures in the past have shown us our areas of weaknesses.”