George Akume, Secretary to the Nigerian government.
Faced with growing leaks of government documents to the public, the Nigerian government has warned that unauthorised disclosure or leakage of official documents, capable of impacting the country negatively, is a punishable offence.
The Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), George Akume, gave the warning on Tuesday in the country’s capital, Abuja, at a workshop organised by the Bureau for Public Service Reforms (BPSR) in collaboration with his office.
Represented at the event by the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the SGF, Akume said unauthorized leakage of sensitive official documents constitutes a felony, and there is no defence for such, either in the Constitution or the country’s Freedom of Information Act.
He stressed that Section 97 (2) of the Criminal Code Act of Nigeria provides that “Any person who, being employed in the public service, without proper authority extracts, or makes a copy of, any document the property of his employer is guilty of a misdemeanour and is liable to imprisonment for one year”.
Akume recalled that the government had devised measures in the past to contain the leakage of sensitive official information in Ministries, Departments and Authorities (MDAs) through the issuance of service-wide circulars by the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation in August 2021.
“This was reinforced by the issuance of another service-wide circular in February 2024 on the unauthorised circulation of official documents with information on social media.
“This was done to re-emphasise other extant regulations prohibiting unauthorised disclosure or leakage of official documents.
“There is the need to regulate the activities of the civil society organisations who use the Freedom of Information Act to harass, intimidate and siphon resources from public officers through the dissemination of fake and unfounded information.
“This should be properly addressed by all the practitioners in the communication and related industries,’’ he said.
This is not the first time such threat has been issued by the Nigerian government. In August 2021, the then head of the country’s civil service had threatened to dismiss any civil servant caught to be leaking official memoranda and other classified documents on social media and other platforms, in breach of oath of secrecy.
The government’s tough stance may be connected to several leaks recently allegedly exposing policy positions that have raised concerns among Nigerians. In particular, two fiscal policy documents in circulation that were given wide coverage by the mainstream media and social media platforms.
One of them was titled Inflation Reduction and Price Stability (Fiscal Policy Measure etc) Order 2024, and purported to be an executive order signed by the president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The other was a 65-page draft document with the title “Accelerated Stabilisation and Advancement Plan (ASAP), which contained suggestions on how to improve the Nigerian economy, and in which the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, had said that fuel subsidy is projected to reach N5.4 trillion by the end of 2024.
The special adviser on information and strategy to President Tinubu, Onanuga, had insisted that none of the documents was an approved official document of the federal government of Nigeria, and that they were all policy proposals that are still subject to review at the highest level of government.
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