Fellow Nigerians and friends from around the world, good day to you all. Trust deficits between the governed and those who govern have long shaped our national story.
Overcoming this requires public administrators across all tiers and branches of government to embrace accountability and transparency in managing the commonwealth of our people. In line with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s
Renewed Hope Agenda, we have begun the deliberate and necessary work of institutionalizing this approach in the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and in the agencies under our oversight.
I am pleased to inform Nigerians that our ministry and its parastatals have entered into a multi-year pact with the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission to monitor, track, and audit expenditures involved in the nationwide overhaul of health infrastructure across all local government areas of the federation.
In the medical profession, prevention is better than cure.
This principle applies equally to our new approach to addressing official corruption and financial misconduct in the health sector. The primary objective of this pact with the ICPC is to institute preventive and corrective anti-corruption mechanisms, with particular emphasis on close surveillance of health parastatals and funding pathways under the Basic Healthcare Provision Fund , which serves as a federal conduit to subnational entities responsible for the judicious use of resources. As part of this partnership, state and local governments will be integrated into strengthened accountability processes to ensure standardized anti-corruption measures nationwide.
More specifically, the ICPC is mandated to report on the status of projects identified by the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency as a prerequisite for final certification of project completion. In real time, the ICPC will provide stage-by-stage monitoring of primary healthcare revitalization projects across all implementing states and local government areas to ensure value for money.
Additionally, our pact with the ICPC introduces a new certification process for anti-corruption training and capacity-building initiatives to support health sector staff in preventing and addressing corrupt practices within their mandates. While these historic steps offer a sustainable template for fiscal prudence in the sector, we are simultaneously advancing a multi-dimensional strategy to confront the threat corruption poses to the health of every Nigerian. We recognize the critical role of our youth in driving reforms at the community level.
This recognition led to the recruitment and deployment of hundreds of Performance and Financial Management Officers (#PFMOs) across all local government areas to continuously assess primary health centre rehabilitation and operational performance.
This initiative complements President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s commissioning of the National Health Fellows—774 young leaders from every local government area—selected through a rigorous process and prepared to sustain the new anti-corruption procedures aligned with their technical and administrative responsibilities.
This fight against long-standing development inhibitors in the health sector is essential not only for improving the lives of Nigerians but also for enhancing donor confidence, with direct implications for non-governmental and multilateral financial support for key health interventions for our nation.
This is our time to reclaim the nation we love, to reject what has held us back, and to affirm a new social contract grounded in integrity, renewed trust, and renewed hope. Thank you, and God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
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