The All Progressive Congress, APC, Kaduna State Transition Commitee, has petitioned the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, asking the commission to investigate the outgoing Kaduna Governor Ramalan Yero.
In the petitioned dated 15th May, 2015, titled: The attempt to misappropriate Sure-P Funds in Kaduna State stated thus; “I write to bring to your attention the elaborate steps being taken by the outgoing Kaduna State Government to legitimise the misappropriation of N2.744 billion Local Government Sure-P funds, and to request that you exercise your responsibility of deterring crime by preventing this last-minute looting of public assets.”
According to the petitioners they wrote that the Kaduna State House of Assembly declined to appropriate the Sure-P funds in the 2015 budget, and promptly removed them from the budgets submitted by the 23 local government councils. The state legislators further resolved that the fate of the funds be left to the incoming administration.
But according to the petition; “the outgoing governor, Mukhtar Ramalan Yero, however has been putting the legislature under tremendous pressure to approve his utilisation of 50% of the Sure-P funds for a road project, while the 23 local government councils would share the balance. Coming from a government whose tenure expires in less than two weeks, the intensity of the lobby for the money indicates a certain desperation that is clearly not in the public interest.”
“I wish to therefore request that you urgently investigate whether the Sure-P funds are still intact, or if they have been spent without appropriation thus necessitating a belated approval from the House of Assembly to provide a ‘legal’ means of retiring the funds. If, as it is widely believed in the state, the monies have already been spent, it is crucial to determine the projects, the contractors and the procurement processes that facilitated such a deliberate haemorrhaging of public funds,” the petitioner said.
