Botched Immigration recruitment: Ex-perm sec gets one year community service

Botched Immigration recruitment: Ex-perm sec gets one year community service

A Federal High Court in Abuja has sentenced a former permanent secretary in the Ministry of Interior, Mrs. Anastasia Daniel-Nwobia, to one year community service, among other penalties.

Justice Nnamdi Dimgba had, in a judgment on April 5, 2022 convicted Mrs. Daniel-Nwobia for breaching the Public Procurement Act (PPA) by adopting the selective tendering procedure in the award of the e-recruitment process in the botched recruitment exercise conducted by the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) in 2014, without the approval of the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP).

Only Mrs. Daniel-Nwobia was convicted out of the four defendants in the case marked: FHC/ABJ/CR/42/2016 prosecuted by Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) through its lawyer, Samuel Chime.

The court freed the other defendants – former Minister of Interior, Abba Moro; Femi Alayebami, a former Deputy Director in the Procurement Department of the Ministry, and a firm, Drexel Tech Global Ltd on the grounds that the prosecution failed to establish their guilt.

In a ruling yesterday Justice Dimgba ordered Mrs. Daniel-Nwobia to teach in any two out of four named Federal Government-owned training institutions for one year at her expense, without cost to the government.

The training institutions among which she is to teach a course in “compliance with the PPA” in two are the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) Training School, Abuja; the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) Training School; Public Service Institute of Nigeria (PSIN), and National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies(NIPSS), Jos.

Justice Dimgba ordered Mrs. Daniel-Nwobia to forfeit 50 per cent of her pension savings for five years and directed that her pension fund administrator – the StanbicIBTC Pension Managers Ltd) – be serve with the court order to that effect.