Murtala Ibrahim, a former auditor with the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN), is the latest person to lose his job after revealing a contract scam in the bank.

When Ibrahim refused to cover up a doctored financial report and blew the whistle about the contract scam in FMBN, he was transferred from the bank’s headquarters to one of its branches in the state.

He was subsequently issued a query and dismissed with the pretense that his service was no longer needed in the bank.

A statement by the Africa Centre for Media and Information Literacy (AFRICMIL), signed by Chido Onumah, the Coordinator, described the sacking of Ibrahim as another failure of the government’s whistle-blower policy.

In the statement, AFRICMIL demanded immediate reinstatement of Ibrahim, and urged Babatunde Fashola, Minister of Works, Power, and Housing, whose ministry oversees the bank, to order a thorough investigation of the scandal.

Ibrahim’s dismissal is coming after the much-publicised ordeal of Ntia Thompson, who was sacked by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after he revealed a fraud at the Directorate of Technical Cooperation in Africa (DTCA), which is now under investigation by the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC).

Several efforts to reinstate Thompson, including a recommendation letter from the Head of Service of the Federation for his recall, have not yielded any positive result several months after he was sacked.

“Instead of persecution or victimisation, whistle-blowers like Mr. Thompson and Ibrahim ought to be rewarded for their acts of patriotism,” said.

He expressed worries that if the government cannot protect internal whistle-blowers, then outsiders and other Nigerians would not be expected to do much in the actualisation of whistle-blower policy.

AFRICMIL, a civil society organization working on building support for the whistle-blower policy of the federal government, called on the federal government to take decisive action on the protection of whistle-blowers by directing its full implementation by all Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, of government.