Edo governor, Adams Oshiomhole, has been nominated by the state’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to be probed in the soon-to-commence anti-corruption campaign of President Muhammadu Buhari, due to alleged claims of financial impropriety, including unpaid local government salaries.
The party Chairman, Chief Dan Orbih, who made this call at a press conference in Benin City, said Adams Oshiomhole’s probe had become imperative since he was the “most traveled of all Governors in Nigeria and must as a matter of responsibility, display to the knowledge of Edo people how much the state government owes within and outside the country in the course of running its affairs.”
According to Orbih, “In the country, Edo state governor has made more foreign trips than any other governor in the country, yet he has not attracted any investment to the state.”
He stated this had led to a series of protests and strikes by aggrieved workers, especially, those of the state judicial staff union of Nigeria (JUSUN) and Nigeria Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE) in the state.
Reacting to this, Oshiomhole, through his Special Adviser (Media and Publicity) Prince Kassim Afegbua, denied the allegation, saying that Orbih “lacked the nuances of government”.
In Afegbua’s words: “There is nothing like squandering local government funds; we don’t even touch their funds.
“When the new local government administration was sworn into office, Comrade Governor gave the local governments the money he kept for them.
“Some local governments got five hundred million, some four hundred million as allocation from the federation account.”
He added: “We (Edo state government) thought that by now Orbih would have been able to equip himself with some level of intellectuality for him to understand the working of government and governance.
“But as hard as he tried, we encourage him to go for refresher course for him to understand the nuances of government, he keeps making all manners of gaffe that in the final analysis exposes his very hollow intellectuality.
“How do you reconcile that N200bn has been appropriated to the state local governments and the Comrade Governor had misappropriated it? It flies in the face of reason and common sense.
“He should take a little bit of pain to do due diligence and see for himself whether the sum of N200bn did even accrue to the 18 local governments in the state before running from pillar to post to make this kind of wild allegation.
“But we don’t blame him because the regime they presided over in the state was that of megalomania, crass materialism and looting to the extent that the state was completely grounded.”
