Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, Wednesday, fired a broadside at former Minister of Finance under Goodluck Jonathan government, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, insisting that the former minister cannot absolve herself from the messy arms deal now being investigated by the Federal Government.
Oshiomhole spoke to the State House correspondents shortly after his visit to President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. Both Oshiomhole and the ex-minister had been on a long drawn verbal exchange with the Governor accusing her of being part of the corruption that headlined the past government.
He said in response to a question: “I am shocked. I have been talking about it, I just said to a couple of persons, the government have to go the whole hog because I know as a governor that no money gets out of the treasury, even after I have approved as the governor without the approval of the Commissioner of Finance. Those are the procedure.
“So the probe should go into whether all these monies were appropriated? When the money got out of the treasury? Through who? The Minister of Finance, under the rules, must endorse before money gets out of the treasury, before CBN approves. So all those Ministers of Finance, including Okonjo-Iweala, I don’t care what people say, because you cannot be coordinating a corruption ridden economy and you pretend to be an angel, you cannot selectively deal with issues, you must deal with all involved in the conspiracy.”
Hee said in criminal law, when two to three people are involved in an act of criminality, all of them are charged with conspiracy.
“You cannot get money out of the Treasury without getting it endorsed and for a government that talks about transparency, due process and I am unable to accept that money will come out without the Minister of Finance having to endorse document and if you endorsed documents, you must follow through to see that the purpose through which funds are released are actually used for that purpose. The NSA is supposed to be an advisory officer; he is not supposed to be a procurement agent for government,” he declared.
According to the governor, Dasuki is just one bleeding point; there are several bleeding points in the system.
“I am happy the figures are coming out and I know that this is a tip of the iceberg,” he said.
He spared not his colleagues on the raging minimum wage debate, stressing that the payment of N18,000 minimum wage should not be a burden to any state governor.
“With due respect to my colleagues, it is offensive to talk about minimum wage. How can the food of the steward be the reason that the elders cannot eat? I mean by conventional wisdom. If there is crisis in the system, it’s the excess fat that will share fats not the skeletons. The idea of using minimum is very offensive.
“The problem with Nigeria is that each time we confront a serious economic problem we look at the escape route option. Those are not the heart of the challenges, we must go to the heart of challenges, we must revisit issues. I also believe it is simplistic to believe that one drug will cure all the ailments in the various states. Every state has to take its own independent evaluation on the nature of its own problems and design appropriate policy instrument to deal with those problems as they relate to each state.”
On the proposed 2016 N6 trillion budget he said: “Over the past four years under the previous government we have been doing the rituals of annual budget basically to service the recurrent expenditure. If you look at the amount allocated for 2015 budget by the previous government, you didn’t have more than 10% allocated to capital projects. It means you are going to watch your infrastructure decay by the day and that explains the crisis of road infrastructure across the country and if you are going to revise that and put more money in capital projects which is the entry point for ordinary Nigerians then you need to increase the size of the budget.
“The options open to government is if you want to cut the personnel cost in order to reduce your recurrent expenditure, then two things will happen. You either reduce wages or the number of workers. But because this government is committed to job creation, that option is clearly not on the card. Then how do you then find funds to deal with capital projects that will improve on the quality of life of people, infrastructure that will create the much talked about enabling environment for business to be able to compete in the Nigerian environment? We don’t need to spend more money and that means you have to reflect the economy; you are not going to bail Nigerians out with the depression we are facing without injecting more funds into the economy,”.
He pleaded with Nigeria to exercise patience with the Buhari government, adding that the benefits of the underground work being done now by the government will soon begin to manifest.
