By When the Auditor-General split his twelve-man audit team into four sub-teams for the special audit of the Federal Government response to COVID-19, Team 3 drew the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, the agency carrying the largest allocation of any single participating agency in the response. It had received N7,289,597,476, and by 30 June 2020 it had spent N2,244,985,572 of it, 31 per cent.
The figures come from the interim report of the special audit for the period 1 March to 30 June 2020, signed by Anthony M. Ayine, Auditor-General for the Federation. Every transaction the auditors examined at the agency arose under Dr Faisal Shuaib, who became the agency's Executive Director in January 2017 and held the office throughout the period the report covers.
The report prints the agency's allocation twice, and the two printings do not agree. Its utilisation table and its audit coverage table give N7,289,597,476, while its appendix of funds released from the 2020 capital budget gives N7,289,577,476, a difference of N20,000 inside the same document.
Of the money the agency did receive, N5,044,611,904 was still unspent at 30 June 2020, four months into the pandemic, on the report's own figures.
What the agency spent the rest on, the report could not establish for any agency, its own included. The COVID-19 money had been given out of existing 2020 budget envelopes, which could not lawfully be spent on COVID-19 lines without virement approval, and the report states that the level of expenditure on COVID-19 from the 2020 appropriation of each participating agency "is unclear". It raises the possibility that agencies vired COVID-19 allocations back to replenish their ordinary budget lines, and it records that the extent of expenditure accrued and awaiting settlement was not fully visible to the Presidential Task Force or to the Accountant-General of the Federation.
Against the agency's name in the utilisation table, the column for audit progress reads "Ongoing". The report states that audit work on the funds the participating agencies spent from their annual appropriations was still underway, and that the findings would be in the next report of the Auditor-General. Its desk work, it says, was reasonably concluded on most of the agencies visited, but physical verification of projects was yet to be concluded, in part because of delays in responses from agencies.
The same interim report closed seven findings against the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, the other frontline health agency in the response. Against the primary health care agency it closed none, because the work on its books had not been finished.
Read also: EXCLUSIVE: Nigeria Centre for Disease Control Director-General Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu Left N486 Million of Staff Advances Unretired, Poured COVID-19 Funds Into Projects That Predated the Pandemic and Never Closed N2.14 Billion of Audit Queries
The agency's own parent ministry spent nothing at all. In the same utilisation table, the Federal Ministry of Health is recorded with an allocation of N2,460,079,287 and expenditure of zero.
In October 2020, President Muhammadu Buhari renewed Shuaib's appointment as Executive Director for a second and final term of four years, to take effect from 10 January 2021.
The interim report was phase one of a three-phase special audit, and in October 2020 the Auditor-General announced that further reports would follow quarterly. No second or third phase has ever been published, and the agency-level findings the first report promised for the primary health care agency have never appeared. SecretsReporters checks of the public record trace no published audit finding, no recovery and no sanction arising from the transactions the auditors examined at the agency.
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