By Abiola Olawale
The immediate-past Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai has carpeted his successor, Governor Uba Sani, accusing him of manufacturing unfounded figures to spoil 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 figure and how it was allegedly misappropriated.
The former commissioners who spoke before the press include; former Commissioner for Environment, Jafaru Sani, Hafsat Baba (ex-commissioner, Ministry of Human Services), Thomas Gyang (Public Works and Infrastructure), Bashir Saidu ( Ministry of Finance) Ibrahim Husaini (Ministry of Agriculture), Aisha Dikko (Ministry of Justice), Fausat Ibikunle (Ministry of Housing and Urban Development) and Idris Nyam, ex-commissioner, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Technology.
They described the so-called report made public by the Kaduna State House of Assembly on June 5, 2024, as plucking outlandish figures out of thin air in the hope of tarnishing the former governor and his administration as corrupt but failed woefully to establish any iota of graft in the end.
They said: “The avalanche of figures seems only to have had the effect of mesmerising the legislators who cite one amount here, and then something different on the same figure.”
According to the former public officials, the alleged siphoning of N423,115,028,072.88 by the Government of Kaduna State from 29th May 2015 to 29th May 2023 is a comical claim as the report does not in anywhere show where the sum of money was taken from and how it was taken and by who.
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.”
Responding also to a fresh allegation about the disbursement of some foreign loans, the former environment commissioner, Sani, said the number of loans listed in the probe report as having been contracted and disbursed before May 2023 was exaggerated.
He said: ‘’Some loans were negotiated and agreed, upon as part of the aspirations for the progress and development of the state.
“However, disbursement of several of these loans listed in the (probe report pages 112-116) had not commenced by the time of the exit of the El-Rufai administration in May 2023.
“These include a $280m loan for the Rural Access and Agricultural Marketing Project. A $150m loan is alleged to have been received from the African Development Bank for the Kaduna Special Agro-Processing Zone.
“The El-Rufai government is justly proud of the planning and hard work its team did to ensure that Kaduna State made the first list of states selected for the SAPZs. However, AfDB had not commenced the disbursement of the loan by May 2023.’’
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.
