The Managing Director of SystemSpecs (owners of Remita), Mr. John Tani Obaro was featured in an interview with Thisday which I thought was interesting. He explained some of the benefits of the homegrown software that powers the Nigerian Government’s Treasury Single Account Initiative.
Here is an excerpt of the interview;
Since the adoption of Remita software by the federal government, to what extent has it been able to block financial leakages within the government circle?
Information is power and one of the ways to control finances is to have information about the finances. That is what Remita was able to make available to all our users. The federal government, for instance, has several ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) and all of these had over 17,000 bank accounts scattered in various banks, making it difficult for government to know the cash position of all MDAs. But with Remita, government now has good information about the position of government money seated in the Treasury Single Account that is controlled by the Central Bank of Nigeria on behalf of the federal government. So government now has information on the total amount of government money in its account and government also has information of the exact amount belonging to each MDA in the TSA account. The ability to have that information and the ability to disburse funds from the single account, is what Remita is offering, thereby reducing transaction time and creating financial accountability.
We also created a platform for electronic receipts, which means that for every payment made into TSA, there is electronic receipt for such payment, thereby eliminating receipt forgery in every financial transaction. So it has helped government in blocking financial leakages that were hitherto taking place.
So what is the volume of financial leakages that Remita software has saved for government, since its adoption?
I am not in a position to give figures on how much Remita has saved for the federal government, but what we have succeeded in doing is to provide a platform for government that gives government accurate information of all financial transactions within the government circle, just as we have done for some state governments and organisations.
For a locally made software owned by a company that is not publicly traded, its interesting to see how the company evolves. Will it someday list on the Nigerian Stock Exchange? On a related note, its disheartening to see a stock like Courteville floundering when it should probably be the company pioneering some of these initiatives.
