Breaking: Fire guts Treasury House.
…no casualty recorded.

The office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF) aslo known as treasury house has been gutted by fire.
The incident happened when the Finance Minister Mrs Zainab Ahmed and other top ministry officials were at the National Assembly. pls read full transcript below:

Just few minutes ago while we were at the National Assembly,the minister of finance national planning and budget and other colleagues briefing the National Assembly on our proposal for the supplementary budget,we got a call that this building was on fire soi had to immediately leave just to have a first hand information as to what is going on
I am glad to report to you that as I got here first and foremost I learnt that the fire has been put out by the fire service in combination with the fire service from the CBN, FCT fire service,NNPC,JULIUS BERGER and also the ministry. All this efforts were led by the federal fire service. I have been briefed that the fire started about 10am this morning in an office in the fourth floor,an officer came to the office he said he put on the Air conditioner and there was a spark and he also noticed smoke, so he immediately put it off but it was still smoking, so he had to rush out to get some help.
The federal fire service were called about 10 minutes past 10am and responded within 4 minutes with three(3) fire trucks however,there was a little bit of difficulty in getting inside the building because they taught the should fight the fire both from inside and outside, but the eventually broke inside to fight the fire and when the saw the extent of the fire, the called for help and all together 25 fire trucks were used to fight the fire and within 35 minutes the fire was put under control.
We have gone rounf the office where the fire affected and j am glad to report to you that our data center where all our records are kept are fully intact there is no dis function so we haven’t lost any records. I also should remind you that for a while we have really gone digital so yet we have some documents that are kept manually but a lot of what we do is online.

And even if the data center were to be affected we have the backup center that is outside of Abuja for recovery for event that we lose the data center. The only thing that has happened to the data center is the exterior where we have the cooling unit at the back because the center always have to be cool. So one of the immediate steps we have taken is just to shut down the data center since the cooling units are not functioning again and we have directed that those cooling units should be immediately put in order ao we don’t loss anything.

So as the government,I just wast to assure you that our records are intact,a few documents are burnt we haven’t started to check what is burnt but all our financial transactions are intact we will be doing full scale investigations using the right professionals just to determine exactly what happened because what I am telling you now is what I have been told, so the professionals will be able to tell us weather it was from the air conditioner or something that was in use and if we have had any materials lost.

Timeline for investigation
First we have to engage the professionals and I have to go back and brief the ministers so when the government is properly briefed we take a decision on who should handle before we will be able to determine that timeline. The thing that is very important right now is to ensure that the cooling system in the data center are functioning

Department affected on the 4th floor
The capital unit where MBA capitals are released

Any casualties recorded
No casualties

Will it affect salary payments

Because we have gone online the accountant general can work from the house and approve payment and the COVID 19 relieve fund doesn’t reside in the accountant general office or in this building what we have done with this COVID fund is to open account at the CBN and also opened five different accounts in commercial banks so that what ever donations made are immediately swept into the TLc Account with the central bank.