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President Muhammadu Buhari’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mohmmed Mahmood Abubakar, is currently under probe for awarding various contracts worth N18.9bn for the clearing of bushes in the wake of the COVID-19 lock down.
Revealing this at the National Assembly, Abuja, Tuesday, during enquiry hearing, Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts, Hon. Oluwole Oke, said the House was curious about the location and importance of such projects and then went ahead to invite the minister and the firms said to have been awarded the contracts.
“We invited the firms to which the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Developments claimed to have given the contracts; however, the firms conspicuously skipped the hearing without giving a valid excuse,” he said, noting nonetheless, that the companies were initially excited to “appear before the committee on investigation of contracts awarded by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development for roads, bush clearing, land preparation and rehabilitation of soil and plant laboratories video utilisation of funds from Service Wide vote between 2013 and 2021 totalling N18,924,004,359.38.”
Oke lamented that, “during the lockdown of the country as a result of COVID 19, some companies took contracts worth about N18 billion for bush clearing from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture for land preparation, rehabilitation of soil plant lab and others, and we needed to have them around to explain how it all went. We cannot shave their heads in their absence. We need them around to give us their own side of the story by responding to the issues and showing us the places they are supposed to have cleared. They have to take us to the land they cleared, tell this committee where and when the jobs were executed.
“We will wait till the end of the hearing today (Tuesday, August 16) to see if they will appear. If they are not here, we will have to do the needful to get them to come.”
The Minister of Agriculture is not alone in the shenanigan. Only recently, President Muhammadu Buhari’s MD/CEO at Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF), Dr Michael Akabogu, has claimed that all of the receipts/vouchers representing a whopping N17.158 billion expenditure at the agency have been eaten by termites, and so, could not be produced.
Akabogu who was appointed in 2021, told the Senate Committee on Public Accounts during expenditure verification that the whopping sum transferred by NSITF from its Skye Bank and First Bank accounts into various unverifiable individual and company accounts from January to December 2013, could not be documentarily accounted for as the mysterious insects came calling.
The Office of the Auditor General for the Federation (OAuGF) had in its 2018 audit report raised 50 different queries on alleged misappropriation of funds by the agency management, which prompted the Senate Committee on Public Accounts to institute a probe.
As at the time of filing this report, the firms being awaited for by the House Committee on Public Accounts had not shown up. Will the committee invoke its legislative powers to do the needful by compelling them to show it the location and when the jobs were done, as threatened by its chairman? Will it not? Only time shall tell./SHARE THIS