- Kaduna Assembly: “We stand by our report, el-Rufai economical with truth”
- El-Rufai: “You Lied…Uba Sani Manufactured Unknown Figures To Chatise Me”
By Abiola Olawale
The Kaduna State House of Assembly and the immediate-past Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai are locked in heated arguments over an indicting report of alleged diversion of N423, 115,028,072.88.
El-Rufai had carpeted his successor, Governor Uba Sani, accusing him of manufacturing unfounded figures to tarnish his hard-earned reputation.
The former governor who spoke through his former commissioners at a press conference in Abuja on Tuesday said the allegations against his administration that a whooping sum of N423,115,028,072.88 was diverted cannot be substantiated.
According to the former commissioners, the allegations are false and unfounded, wondering how the committee set up by Sani came up with the alleged figures and how it was allegedly misappropriated.
The commissioners said: “The Report does not show how they arrived at this figure, and how they decided that money had been siphoned, how it was done, from which accounts and to where. They just decreed a figure and declared it! This is the Ad-hoc Committee in action, indulging in voodoo accounting just to concoct a scandal.
“State Government’s share of revenues is put at N811,663,310,000 on Page 138. Yet, by the time they got to Page 168, the Committee had adopted a different figure of N1,497,682,993.375, without saying how and why. These contradictory figures within the same Report illustrate the lack of consistency, credibility and reliability of the so-called findings.”
However, the Kaduna House of Assembly in a swift response described the actions of El-Rufai’s aides as desperate and futile moves to denigrate the House and cover up the alleged fraud perpetrated during their administration.
Chairman Fact-Finding Committee and Deputy Speaker of the Assembly, Henry Magaji in a statement said: “If they genuinely have the interest of Kaduna State and are truly men and women of integrity, they would have applied themselves to developing the state instead of participating in the alleged pilfering of its scarce resources,”
“The attention of the Kaduna State House of Assembly has been drawn to a press conference addressed by some senior political appointees of the immediate past administration of Malam Nasir El-Rufai.
“In the press conference, the former political appointees made strenuous efforts to pick holes in the report of the Probe Committee. They resorted to name-calling and wild allegations on the motivations for the House Probe. We wish to state as follows:
“The press conference was just a rehash of the vituperations and innuendoes heaped on us by the former political appointees in their first press briefing. There was nothing new that should warrant our response. They failed to address the main issue, which is the systematic and coordinated cornering of the resources of Kaduna State through phoney contracts and outright looting.”
It would be recalled that an ad-hoc committee set up by the Kaduna State House of Assembly to investigate all finances, loans and contracts awarded under the immediate-past governor had indicted El-Rufai and some of his appointees of siphoning N423bn state funds.
The assembly, while adopting the report of the 13-man panel, asked the state governor to refer El-Rufai, his finance commissioner and other aides to relevant security agencies for investigation.
Subsequently, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) set up a panel to investigate the alleged fraud.
