“I have worked faithfully; we trusted that the government had us covered with these cooperatives, and that’s why we relied on them. Now, I don’t know where all of my money has gone,” Bode (not real name), a Lagos State civil servant, told FIJ on Monday.

Bode is one of the thousands of civil servants working in Lagos who signed up for a cooperative society membership.

Savings and credit cooperative societies are common among the working-class crowd in Lagos, and like everyone else, Bode wanted to save up a portion of her salary consistently and on a reliable model. Another cooperative society randomly pulled the personal data of Bode and others to divert their monthly remittances.

Civil servants have told FIJ that millions have gone missing on account of this particular cooperative society and the Lagos State Government has not been of any help to recover their money.

A DECADE OF COOPERATIVE SAVINGS DISRUPTED

“I am an employee of the Lagos State Government. Our code of ethics does not really permit us to grant interviews without permission from our superior officers. I would like to remain anonymous,” Bode said. “This issue is affecting me and my health; my job is at stake, but I just have to air my views because this could help others.”

A member of a cooperative society for the past 10 years, Bode observed in June 2022 that her deductions that should have been moved from her salary for the cooperative were unremitted.

“I alerted my cooperative, and they confirmed it,” she said.

“When the payslip came out, we checked for the code to know where the money went. It went to another cooperative. We found this out around July. The payslip is made available about a month after the payment for a particular payment.

“So, in July and August, my money was correctly paid to my cooperative society. By September, the money started going to a different cooperative again. Every effort to contact the executive members of that cooperative proved abortive. The code of that cooperative is DB62. It is a cooperative in the Shomolu Local Government Area.”

Bode told FIJ how the president of her cooperative tried to contact the Shomolu cooperative society and failed. Frustrated, the president gave up on looking for the executive members of that cooperative society. Bode had to look for her missing savings all by herself.

At this point, she had lost six months’ worth of her cooperative society savings.

“The total amount of my money taken was N420,000 — from an accumulated N70,000 monthly remittance. They deducted it for six months since January 2022,” Bode said.

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PROMISE TO REFUND MONEY FROM A LIQUIDATED COOPERATIVE SOCIETY

Wande Adeboye, Bode’s colleague and fellow member of their cooperative society, told FIJ that she and Bode had endured frustration from delays.

Adeboye told FIJ she met the men in charge of the Shomolu DB62 cooperative society elsewhere. An insider familiar with the situation had informed them that DB62 had been liquidated and one of its executive members was in an office in the Mushin area of Lagos.

“When my cooperative society notified me of my misplaced remittances, I had to download my payslips. All cooperative societies have unique codes. So, if the codes attached to certain cooperatives are switched to the codes to other cooperatives, the savings would go to the other cooperatives. The codes were always on the payslips,” Adeboye told FIJ.

“We discovered where the money went to and we went to the Oracle Lagos office. Oracle handles the personal details and provides identification numbers to civil servants who use cooperative society services. They got the number using the unique cooperative society code to trace them. Our cooperative society executive members got the phone numbers and locations. When they got there, when they got to Shomolu, they saw that there was no building. There were no people and no structure present to indicate that there was a cooperative society there.

“They asked some people around there and they were told that the building was actually demolished. They said that we should go to Mushin to search for so and so person. We went to Mushin, and we got the man, one Mr Michael. He wasn’t around on the first day we visited, and his colleagues gave us a phone number different from the one we initially got from Oracle.

“He used to read our messages but he would not respond. They called him and we were told to write to apply for the money, include our payslip and indicate the number of months with the total amount of money. We did this and his colleagues received this. They signed it on his behalf around February. We went there after the general election. We didn’t know who the man really was; we only knew that he was ‘Mr Michael’.

“When we went after the governorship election, we returned and asked for Mr Michael. They told us that the man who just left was Mr Michael. We caught up with him and introduced ourselves. He owned up and said that he had got the letter and had forwarded the letter to his president. He said that they were going to hold a meeting and our money would be paid.”

Michael Okonoboh, the financial secretary of DB62, promised both Adeboye and Bode a quick resolution after a meeting with his fellow executives in February. Weeks became months, and Okonoboh said nothing more.

“Two or three weeks later, we didn’t hear from him. We sent him messages and he wouldn’t reply despite viewing the messages,” Adeboye explained.

“My colleague (Bode) decided to go back to their office in Mushin. When she got there, she was told to wait for Mr Michael but she waited for over an hour without seeing him. She started crying there and people at that office inquired what the problem was. She explained everything to them and narrated how we had been trying to retrieve out money for months.

“Immediately, Mr Michael’s boss called him and he showed up from nowhere, after two hours of waiting. They were begging her and they were able to pacify her. He promised that we would get our money. A week later, they paid my colleague N150,000 out of her missing N420,000. She called me to tell me about it. We both went to the Mushin office and met Mr Michael’s boss.

“Mr Michael wasn’t around. I explained that I was the other person and I had got nothing from my missing funds. They advised us to go to Alausa and lodge a complaint. We wrote a letter to the ministry of finance and they said that they were going to work on it. We also told them at Oracle and Oracle told us that they would work on it. I still don’t know where the letter is till today.

“What we heard was that they did not see any letter. We wrote that letter on the 17th of April. Now, we don’t even know our fate. We don’t know if we are going to get our money back. Some people were telling us that the cooperative was in distress. My money there is N350,000.”

PRESIDENT INCOMMUNICADO

Opeoluwa Sangosanya was an executive member of DB62, like Okonoboh. Sangosanya was the president.

FIJ had called Okonoboh for an interview but his phone numbers were either inoperable or he simply refused to answer his calls.

Sangosanya was unreachable too.

“The culture is that, if a wrong deduction happens, the ministry of finance will give the code for that transaction, including the name and phone number of the people to meet,” Bode told FIJ. “But the phone numbers of these people we got from Alausa were not going through. We would call and nobody would pick. We called that phone number for months and it failed to answer the calls.”

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SHOMOLU’S DB62 NOTORIOUSLY RESPONSIBLE FOR MISPLACED MILLIONS IN SAVINGS

In their quest to recover their misplaced savings, there have been a few colleagues who discouraged Bode and Adeboye.

Bode told FIJ how some fellow civil servants expressed doubt over a possible recovery of their money. Others referred to previously misplaced cooperative savings.

“A colleague from the mainland also narrated his cooperative experience with that same Shomolu cooperative to me. He is an executive member in one of the cooperatives there,” Bode told FIJ.

“This man told me that this Shomolu DB62 is still owing them more N3 million, as far back as 2018. Up till now, no information from Shomolu DB62 cooperative. He was the person that even told me that I prayed that I see my money, but in his own opinion I should just forget about the money.

“My understanding is that this DB62 cooperative has issues but the government and the people overseeing cooperatives should know this. They keep deducting innocent people’s salaries and we cannot fully recover. It’s like that cooperative is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

“I have been to Alausa, I have also written to the ministry of finance and the permanent secretary for over a month now; I haven’t heard anything from them. No response, nothing. They told me that another woman had almost N1 million of her money go to the same Shomolu cooperative. So, I don’t know. My fear is that I will leave the comfort of my home every morning for my means of livelihood and when it is time for me to be paid it will go to the wrong place.

“This is a financial embarrassment. I don’t know what I am even working for. The government is aware of these cooperatives and there is supposed to be a regulatory body; that’s why we had the confidence to join them. This Shomolu cooperative is notorious. People know and they are just keeping quiet.”

MINISTRY YET TO RESPOND

One of the core mandates of the Lagos State Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Cooperatives (MCIC) is the supervision of cooperative societies.

MCIC’s supervision ought to protect staff of the Lagos State Civil Service from suffering losses via misplaced cooperative savings. Lagos civil servants such as Bode and Adeboye have gone to the cooperative societies like the Shomolu DB62 chapter to retrieve their misplaced remittances without success.

On May 25, FIJ emailed Lagos State’s MCIC to inquire about the Shomolu cooperative society’s status. Lola Akande, MCIC commissioner, was also copied.

Three weeks later, FIJ has still not received a response from Akande or the MCIC.