Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Yakubu Dogara, has uncovered massive fraud and theft perpetrated by Bauchi State government under Governor Mohammed Abdullahi Abubakar to the tune of N400 billion from May 2015 when he assumed office to date.
PoliticsNGR
gathered that while speaking at a campaign rally in Dass, headquarters
of Dass local government area on Friday, Hon Dogara presented documented
evidence to a mammoth crowd of his constituents showing how thousands
of non-existent people were said to have been employed in 2015 shortly
after the governor came into office.
The Speaker challenged
Governor Abubakar to take him to court and promised that he will defend
the allegations and added that as a lawyer he knows the law and would
not level false allegations against anyone if he does not have evidence.
A
perusal of one of the documents indicates that not fewer than 1,200
people were said to have been employed and added into the state’s
payroll beginning from July 2015.
However, one of the ghost
employees by name, Bappale Adamu, was said to have been born in 1899,
which is 120 years ago and started work with the Bauchi state government
on July 24, 2015 and will retire from the service in 2023.
Another
startling revelation showed that all the 1,200 workers, though have
different names and dates of birth, have the same Bank Verification
Number (BVN), meaning that their entire salary was being paid into one
and same bank account under different names.
The salaries vary from N39,000 to N86,000 and above.
The
speaker also wondered how Bauchi State monthly salary skyrocketed from
N2.6 billion per month in May 2015 to N7 billion without recruitment of
additional workers, especially as the governor had early in his
administration, fired thousands of political appointees engaged by
former governor Isa Yuguda, which should have reduced the state’s wage
bill drastically.
He also accused the governor of diverting billions of local government funds in the last 3 1/2 years.
The
Speaker also recalled how the governor chased away contractors
renovating Dass Central Mosque but failed to renovate it after repeated
promises and revealed how he personally paid for the renovation of the
mosque.
It would be recalled that the Bauchi state Government had
owed workers more than one year salaries following series of
verifications allegedly to remove ghost workers from the state’s payroll
by the present administration at its inception in 2015, but sadly,
shortly after that, the monthly salary bill increased from N2.6 billion
to about N7 billion.
In August 2016, political leaders and
stakeholders from the state led by the Speaker sought President
Mohammadu Buhari’s intervention on the non-payment of salaries which
didn’t yield any result and has been the major source of disagreement
between the Speaker, political leaders, stakeholders and the Bauchi
state Governor.
Source:- Politicsngr
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