ANTI-CORRUPTION advocates in Nigeria have called on the Federal Government to pass the whistleblower protection bill into law to help eliminate corruption in the country.

They made the call at a national conference organised by the African Centre for Media & Information Literacy (AFRICMIL), in collaboration with Amnesty International Nigeria, in Abuja on Thursday, September 19.

The ICIR reports that the call followed previous appeals by the group to pass the bill.

AFRICMIL’s coordinator, Chido Onumah, said many whistleblowers in Nigeria suffered prosecution and described the practice as a human rights violation.

“We called this conference to highlight the importance of whistleblowing, fight against corruption and to highlight the fact that a lot of Nigerians who blow the whistle suffer prosecution, which is essentially a human rights violation. So if we understand this connection, how do we deal with it?” he said.

He added, “We are working with media to report the cases of those who are being victimised. We are working with Amnesty International and government agencies like the Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA) to highlight the cases of whistle-blowers and the need for action. But importantly, we put this together to ensure that the government passes the whistle-blower protection law. Without a law, it is going to be difficult to protect the whistle-blowers.

The keynote speaker at the event and the senior legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), Maxwell Kadiri, noted that whistleblowing goes beyond the fight against corruption but cuts into the protection of human rights, thus the need for the whistleblowing protection law.

“We are addressing the emerging realities and challenges that whistleblowers in Nigeria are going through. The advocacy for the enactment of a whistleblowing protection law has been in place for over two decades and just got ratcheted up by the last administration when it adopted an all-inclusive policy which was adopted in 2016.

“But before then, they had pocket of policies that were institution specifics, put in place by regulatory agencies. With the policy of December 2016, we then had the federal government adopt a framework that was going to apply throughout the federation.

“That then gave further impetus and attention to the whole question of whistle-blowing. But then, the slants they gave to it is using it to deal with corruption, basically doing recoveries which now gave a narrower focus to whistleblowing.

In August, security agents picked up a whistleblower, Bristol Tamunobiefiri, also known as PIDOM, in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

The Nigeria Police Force arraigned him before a Federal High Court in Abuja and the court sent him to the Kuje prison over money laundering charges.