The Provost, Anti-Corruption Academy, a training arm of the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, in Lafia, Nasarawa State, Prof. Sola Akinrinade, speaks on corruption-related issues in this interview with SUNDAY ABORISADEWhat is the mandate of the academy?
The Institute is the training arm of the ICPC. Its mandate borders on internal and external trainings. But its primary commission is to train ICPC members of staff and to build their capacity to enable them to deliver on their responsibilities. Every organisation knows what it needs from its workers. If you want to get results from your workers, you need to equip them with appropriate skills and knowledge to enable them to perform such functions effectively.
The academy also engages the larger society. First, it engages officials of the ministries, departments and agencies of government. Second, it deals with institutions, organisations that have bearing with the government. In building their capacity, we will be able to tackle corruption in the various agencies. In the last two years, particularly since 2012, the ICPC has carried out a number of studies, trying to understand the corruption-prone activities in various agencies and arms of government. We have been trying to work with the leaders of those agencies in addressing those corruption-prone areas. When we identify the areas, we also work with heads of the agencies to be able to overcome their weakness.
We also recommend their personnel for training. For instance, when we noted that procurement issues could be a problem for some agencies, we trained them in tackling corruption in procurement. We work with the agencies in order to identify areas of corruption in their organisations and on how to overcome them.
How do you carry out this task?
The first thing we do is knowledge production through research. We have a section that deals with knowledge dissemination and we hope to become a centre of excellence in the sub-region in generating knowledge-driven policies for tackling corruption. The other is through the certification programme. We are working with higher institutions to run certificate, diploma and postgraduate programmes, including master’s in anti-corruption studies.
How does the institute admit students?
Our focus is actually on practitioners, those working in the anti-corruption agencies. Our master’s and diploma programmes are for those already in the system. The aim is to enhance their capacity to deliver and to perform their duties. It is not a generalised master’s programme. It is just to equip those working in the anti-corruption agencies and those in allied areas.
We are working with tertiary institutions because we cannot award degrees but we want to work with universities that can award degrees to train these people using their own authorities. We are working with them based on the curriculum we have developed. We are also doing a lot of work with similar organisations in other parts of the world but we want to develop ourselves that is the academy, as a kind of regional centre focusing on training in anti-corruption and knowledge generation.
Is the institute making efforts to train workers in private firms?
Actually, we are reaching out to the private sector in various ways. There are critical sectors, such as those in the financial sector, in the construction, those in service sector. Again, we are reaching out to those that deal with the government, especially those getting contracts. Sometimes, they are actually the ones corrupting the public sector officials. So we are working with them. We are trying to reach out to these organisations to be able to introduce programmes that would affect them positively.
A critical sector that we are hoping to work with is the media. The media is very critical in any issue we are dealing with in terms of reporting and in terms of what it considers important. We will be looking at media and corruption. How the media can assist in tackling corruption. How the media can tackle corruption. It is a big task but if we can construct alliances and build stakeholders in various sectors, it will be a lot easier for us at the end of the day.
What is the institute doing to take anti-corruption crusade to the schools and to create the awareness in the minds of the younger ones?
I can tell you confidently that we are at the advanced stage of developing our curriculum for anti-corruption studies. The Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Ethics and Values has been working with ICPC over the past few months to develop curriculum for anti-corruption studies and we are trying to reach out to the university system to build in anti – corruption work into its curriculum for general studies.
However, I must caution that in building or developing new courses, particularly at the elementary and secondary school levels, we have to be mindful of the amount of the information that we can pump into the young ones. The curriculum that we made use of during our time was not as vast as what they have today in primary and secondary schools. They now have subjects in sexuality, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and computer, among others, and all these are expanding the curriculum.
We have to be careful about introducing new subjects but we know full that we can achieve the objective by putting in the key elements into the curriculum of the existing subjects. For instance, we can incorporate the elements of anti-corruption into subjects, such as Government and Civic without necessarily developing a completely new programme for them.
In the university system, we can build anti-corruption studies into the General Study programme. If we start a new programme, we could build up resistance within the school system. But if we build the content into the various aspects, we would be able to achieve more because the essence is for them to learn to get the issues. It is not so much whether they score an ‘A’ in the subject because scoring an ‘A’ does not mean that you are not going to be corrupt. It only tells you that you know how to bypass the various things. What we are harping on is the attitudinal change among our youths.
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