The attention of the Action Democratic Party (ADP) has been drawn to yet another large scale corruption being orchestrated by the Buhari led government where a whopping sum of N50b has been discovered in secret accounts contrary to the idea behind the TSA, that all monies generated by MDAs be remitted into the account.
It took the intervention of an ad hoc committee of the National Assembly chaired by Hon. Abubakar Danburam-Nuhu from Kano State to discover this huge fraud allegedly approved by the president.
We have gathered that this directive was implemented by the NNPC GMD, Mr. Baru, to have some commercial banks keep money generate from oil revenue accounts outside the TSA. This is in breach of the TSA policy, which provides that all revenues from Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government should be transferred to the TSA.
The said approval was a memo written by the chief of staff to president Buhari, Mr. Abba Kyari, authorizing the NNPC to exclude the said sum from the TSA. Our party is shocked by this unbelievable development.
Nigerians will recall that the same president moved against our tertiary institutions, ordering them to comply strictly with the TSA policy. We are yet to rationalize the reason for this exclusion or would it be safe to say that the president and his party have started stacking funds to be used for the 2019 general elections?
We are demanding that president Buhari explain to Nigerians why he gave such an order and for what purpose. It is again shocking that the president repeatedly disregard rules whenever it pleases him, it must be said that a distortion of processes is a serious aspect of corruption.
The TSA was created to mitigate revenue leakages, but we wonder where all the noise of fighting corruption is coming from, when the evidence points to the contrary. We have also not forgotten the fact that several members of the president’s cabinet such as Babachir Lawal and others are still walking free despite the allegations of corruption running into hundreds of millions still hanging on their necks.
It is safe to say that president Buhari himself is the supervisor of corruption because his cabinet members and appointees cannot be carrying out these large scale corrupt activities without his knowledge as he has refused to act in the cases of those caught in the act. It is said that birds of a feather flock together.
Since president Buhari came on board in 2015, Nigeria has not fared better; corruption, hunger, poverty and death have been the hallmark of his maladministration. His continuous failure to transform the economy into a growing one has made Nigeria slide down to becoming the world’s headquarters of poverty and corruption.
Thousands of Nigerians are falling into the poverty bracket in an alarming rate.
The ADP as a credible alternative is a party guided by social democratic principles and we will work hard with all stakeholders to continue to hold this government accountable while we make preparations to take over in 2019 so as to make life easy and better for all Nigerians.