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In a bid to ease the financial burden of preparing children for the new academic session, Alert Microfinance Bank, a member of Alert Group, has supported 100 pupils across two schools in Lagos State with essential educational materials.

The initiative, implemented under the bank’s Back-to-School Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme, benefited 50 pupils each from IPHY Kiddies School, Ebute-Metta, and Rock of Ages School, Ikorodu.

The intervention, according to the bank, underscores its commitment to responsible banking, community development and creating meaningful social impact in communities where its customers live and operate.

Each beneficiary received a back-to-school package containing a school bag, exercise books, writing materials, a mathematical set and a reusable water bottle.

The bank said the initiative was designed to help reduce some of the costs associated with preparing children for a new school term, while ensuring that pupils have access to basic learning materials needed for effective participation in school.

Speaking during the exercise, Raji Saheed, managing director/CEO, Alert Microfinance Bank said the initiative reflected the bank’s belief that its relationship with customers should extend beyond financial services to creating positive impact in the communities it serves.

‘At Alert, we believe that our responsibility goes beyond providing financial solutions. The communities and businesses we serve are important partners in our growth, and we are committed to creating opportunities that positively affect the lives of people around them,’ he said.

Also speaking, Kayode Abraham, chief marketing officer, Alert Group, described education as one of the most important investments in the future, noting that the initiative was aimed at giving the beneficiaries greater confidence as they return to school.

‘Education remains one of the most important investments we can make in the future. Through this initiative, Alert is supporting these children with some of the tools they need to learn with greater confidence as they return to school.

‘This intervention demonstrates our philosophy of turning customer relationships into tangible community impact, captured in the idea: ‘Bank with Us, Grow with Us, Give Back Together,” Abraham said.

At IPHY Kiddies School, representatives of the institution expressed appreciation to the bank for the gesture, describing it as timely support for the pupils and their families.

The Proprietress of IPHY Kiddies School, Okeke Anna Ifunaya, said the materials would provide meaningful support to both the pupils and their parents ahead of the new academic session.

‘We appreciate Alert Microfinance Bank for this thoughtful intervention. The materials will be useful to the children and will also provide meaningful support to their parents as they prepare for the new school session,’ she said.

Similarly, the management of Rock of Ages School commended the bank for extending its relationship with the institution beyond banking services to an initiative that directly benefits the children.

Alert Microfinance Bank said it would continue to identify opportunities to create value in the communities it serves, particularly through initiatives focused on education, financial inclusion, enterprise development and sustainable community growth.

The bank added that its Back-to-School programme forms part of its broader commitment to combining financial empowerment with measurable social impact, while building lasting relationships with customers and communities.

Alert Microfinance Bank is a financial institution with a national licence, committed to providing accessible financial solutions to individuals and businesses while promoting financial inclusion, enterprise development and sustainable economic growth.

Governor Bala Mohammed Abdulkadir of Bauchi State has expressed deep dissatisfaction with the slow pace of the N29.6 billion Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes (ACReSAL) flood and erosion control project, which currently stands at just 7.2% completion.

The governor expressed his dissatisfaction during his inspection visit to the project site at the Abubakar Tatari Ali Polytechnic and urged the contractor to urgently deploy additional equipment and manpower to accelerate work and meet the stipulated deadline.

He emphasised that because the project is fully funded, there is no justification for unnecessary delays.’The state has demonstrated its commitment by releasing 40 per cent of the contract sum.’

The governor said that ‘We expect the contractor to show a matching readiness and capability to execute this vital work.’

Governor Bala Mohammed highlighted the deep historical and humanitarian significance of the project, noting that it was originally conceived during the administration of former Governor of the state, Ahmed Adamu Mu’azu.

While described the current phase as a massive humanitarian effort designed to safeguard vulnerable communities living along riverbeds and flood-prone areas.

Also speaking during the inspection, Joy Agene, who is the ACReSAL Task Team Lead, commended the quality of the engineering work executed so far, while echoing the Governor’s concerns regarding the sluggish timeline.

Agene said that the project is one of ACReSAL’s largest interventions nationwide in terms of scope, scale and financial cost, making swift execution critical.

The project contractor blamed the slow progress primarily on the challenges of the ongoing rainy season.

He assured the Governor that a massive remobilisation strategy is already underway to salvage the timeline,

He also promised that four separate teams will be deployed simultaneously across different sections of the micro-catchment area, armed with extra equipment and increased manpower.

The contractor expressed absolute confidence that the entire project will be completed between March and April, 2027.

The ancient proverb of the three wise monkeys, ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,’ was originally a parable encouraging personal values and virtue. In the modern corporate boardroom, the proverb has evolved into a blueprint for complicity. When directors and senior executives deliberately ignore misconduct, refuse to hear warnings, and remain silent in the face of wrongdoing, they are not protecting themselves or their institutions. They are actively enabling corruption, destroying governance, and perpetuating cycles of harm. In my experience, I have witnessed widespread instances of wilful ignorance (comprising wilful blindness, wilful deafness, and wilful muteness) that have transformed passive inaction into active complicity. I have also witnessed the whistleblower who sees and hears, dares to speak up and challenge wrongdoing, rapidly become a pariah and have the tables turned so the would-be hero/heroine becomes the sinner/enemy of the corporation.

Wilful ignorance is a deliberate choice to avoid knowledge that would demand action. In corporate settings, this manifests not as negligence or oversight. It manifests as executives who sign off on suspicious transactions without asking questions, boards that schedule no time for compliance reports, and managers who instruct subordinates, ‘Don’t bring me bad news.’ The legal and psychological doctrine of conscious avoidance holds that deliberately ignoring red flags is equivalent to actual knowledge. In practice, boardrooms across the world have elevated this evasion to an art form, deliberately limiting their direct/explicit knowledge of unethical actions and thus giving rise to the possibility of plausible deniability.

Closer to home, the saga of NNPC refineries offers a clear example. Between 2010 and 2024, according to media reports, billions of dollars were allocated to ‘turnaround maintenance’ of the Port Harcourt, Kaduna, and Warri refineries. Despite the huge sums allegedly expended, the refineries remained largely non-operational. Reports from various quarters revealed systematic contract inflation, over-invoicing, and payments for work never performed. No proper maintenance had occurred since 2001. The question is not whether senior officials knew; the question is how they could not have known. The answer is wilful blindness, a collective decision to look away because seeing would perhaps require stopping a lucrative flow of public funds.

Defenders of corporate silence often argue that looking away is a rational self-protection mechanism. Speaking up risks retaliation, losing bonuses, or career termination. In toxic organisational cultures and high-poverty environments, silence is the safest path. However, this argument collapses once a director has reason to know that serious misconduct is occurring. At that point, continued inaction ceases to be defensive and becomes complicit, aiding and abetting. Silence in the boardroom is not neutrality; it is a vote for the status quo.

Wilful ignorance cannot coexist with good governance; it systematically dismantles it. Effective governance relies on psychological safety and four pillars: transparency, accountability, checks and balances, and a culture of dissent. Each of these is corroded when board members adopt the three monkeys’ posture.

Transparency vanishes when executives conceal risks and boards do not ask to see them. Accountability evaporates when no one can be queried on a decision because everyone looks away. Checks and balances become farcical. Thus, corporations have audit committees that never audit and risk committees that never meet. Most damagingly, a culture of dissent is crushed. Whistleblowers are fired or driven into hiding. Honest employees learn that raising concerns ends careers. Over time, the boardroom becomes a rubber stamp and a chamber of enforced silence, where the only safe words are ‘I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I said nothing.’

The NNPC case again illustrates this collapse. Whistleblowers who attempted to expose refinery fraud were publicly accused of blackmailing the company. An attempt by a former Group Managing Director to scrap the dysfunctional refineries and start fresh was ignored-presumably because the ‘maintenance’ cycle had become a patronage machine. Nobody was tried; nobody went to jail. No director resigned in protest. The governance system did not fail; it was just subverted by those who chose not to see.

The final and most destructive consequence of wilful ignorance is that it perpetuates wrongdoing across time. When misconduct goes unpunished, it becomes normalised, and deviance then escalates. A culture of looking away does not limit corruption; it recruits new cowed participants. Junior managers observe that silence is rewarded and speaking up is punished. They learn to produce the reports that no one reads, to attend the meetings where no one speaks, and to sign the documents that no one verifies. By refusing to hear the warnings, corporations perpetuate wrongdoing. The wrongdoing does not stop; it is simply ignored into continuity.

The three monkeys belong in parables, not in boardrooms. When leaders choose wilful blindness, muteness, and deafness, they cross a clear line from self-protection to complicity. They destroy the very foundations of governance: transparency, accountability, checks and balances, and the courage to dissent. True corporate leadership demands the opposite: see evil, hear evil, speak evil, and then act. Anything less is cowardice dressed as prudence, and it makes every silent director an accomplice to the very crimes they claim to have never witnessed.

Corporations cannot rely on individual conscience alone and need to set up enabling structures for accountability, e.g., mandatory reporting, risk assessments, whistleblower protection, and most importantly, legal consequences and criminal liability for unethical corporate activities and wilful ignorance.

Public sector wage bills are overwhelming Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) across Northern Nigeria, leaving almost the entire region fiscally vulnerable and dependent on federal allocations.

According to BudgIT’s 2026 analysis of the state finances report, Kaduna and Kwara were the only northern states among those covered by the study that generated enough revenue to cover their personnel costs in 2025, while every other state recorded staggering deficits.

Kaduna generated N86.72 billion in IGR against personnel expenditure of N77.63 billion, leaving a positive balance of N9.09 billion. Kwara generated N85.21 billion compared with N65.22 billion spent on personnel, representing a surplus of N19.99 billion.

The performance of other northern states was considerably weaker.

Yobe generated only N15.42 billion in IGR while spending N76.34 billion on personnel, leaving a gap of N60.91 billion. Jigawa recorded N35.27 billion in IGR against personnel expenditure of N92.66 billion, producing a N57.39 billion shortfall.

Kogi generated N36.50 billion against personnel expenditure of N89.20 billion, while Benue generated N29.38 billion compared with N73.94 billion spent on personnel. Adamawa recorded N24.14 billion in IGR against N65.73 billion in personnel expenditure.

Sokoto generated N20.58 billion against N58.65 billion in personnel expenditure, while Kebbi recorded N18.41 billion in IGR compared with N44.82 billion in personnel costs.

Gombe generated N36.36 billion against personnel expenditure of N53.95 billion.

Other northern states, including Bauchi, Borno, Kano, Katsina, Nasarawa, Niger, Plateau and Zamfara, also recorded personnel expenditure above their IGR.

The figures are particularly significant because they come at a time when the debate over fiscal federalism is gaining renewed momentum, with increasing calls for states to take greater responsibility for raising revenue, attracting investment and financing development.

Sani Yau Babura, an economist, said the figures should be viewed beyond the narrow question of whether states can pay salaries from IGR, arguing that the more important issue is the capacity of state economies to generate sufficient resources to finance sustainable development.

For northern states, the challenge is particularly acute because weak IGR means that increased federal allocations can provide temporary fiscal relief without necessarily addressing the structural weaknesses of their local economies.

The BudgIT analysis shows that aggregate FAAC allocations to the states increased from N3.43 trillion in 2022 to N11.38 trillion in 2025, representing a 232.06 percent increase.

IGR also increased during the period, rising from N1.57 trillion to N4.15 trillion. However, the increase in IGR was slower than the growth in FAAC receipts.

As a result, the proportion of aggregate state revenue coming from FAAC increased from 68.7 percent in 2022 to 73.3 percent in 2025, while the contribution of IGR declined from 31.4 percent to 26.7 percent.

For the northern economy, this trend presents a fundamental policy dilemma.

Greater fiscal federalism would ordinarily require states to possess stronger independent revenue bases. But where state governments remain heavily dependent on federal transfers, increased fiscal responsibility without corresponding economic expansion could constrain their ability to provide infrastructure, improve public services and stimulate private-sector activity.

This could also affect the quality and pace of physical development.

A state with a weak revenue base has less fiscal room to consistently invest in roads, water infrastructure, healthcare, education, urban renewal, industrial estates and other productive infrastructure after meeting salaries and other recurrent obligations.

The problem is more pronounced in states where personnel expenditure is rising faster than internally generated revenue.

Jigawa provides one of the clearest examples. Its IGR declined from N59.40 billion in 2022 to N35.27 billion in 2025, while personnel expenditure increased from N52.37 billion to N92.66 billion.

The state therefore experienced the unusual combination of declining internally generated revenue and sharply rising personnel costs.

Sokoto and Ebonyi were also among the three states in the study whose IGR declined between 2022 and 2025. Sokoto’s revenue fell from N23.60 billion to N20.58 billion, while Ebonyi’s declined marginally from N23.89 billion to N23.25 billion.

The challenge, however, is not simply a northern problem. Across the 34 states covered by the BudgIT report, only eight generated enough IGR to exceed their personnel expenditure in 2025.

The remaining 26 states collectively generated about N1.16 trillion internally but spent approximately N1.91 trillion on personnel, leaving a combined gap of about N747 billion.

The figures do not mean that states are expected to finance salaries exclusively from IGR. Statutory allocations remain a legitimate source of government revenue. Rather, the comparison highlights the extent of states’ fiscal independence and the vulnerability of their finances to changes in federal transfers.