The Director General of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Dr Gambo Aliyu, has said the agency provided its Global Fund grant records to government in line with the requirements of the grant process.
He stated this during an interview with Daily Trust in Abuja. The Senate had earlier decried the delay in submission of the report (which usually contained the amount received and how it was utilized) by the agency.
The Senate complaint followed the 2016 Report of the Auditor General of the Federation, submitted to the Senate Committee on Public Accounts that the request for the presentation of the document for audit was made in 2016 but was not responded to till seven months later.
Aliyu said the reason it was not submitted when the submission request was made was because NACA had to discuss with the country team in Geneva about the request from the Nigerian government and the nature of the request.
He said: “So Global Fund reviewed it and gave the go-ahead for the document to be shared with the government of Nigeria. NACA shared it when the approval was given. So the time interval between request and submission wasn’t because NACA was hiding any information, but because that is what the grant process requires.”
Aliyu, who was appointed as the DG in 2019, said it was a miscommunication to say the report was not available, adding “it is available and accessible any time not only from NACA alone but from auditors, the Country Coordinating Mechanism (CCM), and from Global Fund office in Geneva.”
He said grants from Global Fund are usually spent under stringent conditions, and misappropriation and fraud were not possible under the arrangement.
“There is a team hired by Global Fund and in our case stationed in NACA to implement Global Fund projects; and there are auditors that audit every payment that is made before and after payment is made,” he said.
