Former directors of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have responded to allegations that they squandered a total of N7.7 billion in party money.
The six directors whose positions are in jeopardy are as follows: Anietie Offong (Welfare), Bartholomew Ugwoke (Research), Abubakar Suleiman (Finance), Dr. Suleiman Abubakar (Administration), Salisu Dambatta (Publicity), and Dare Oketade (Legal Head).
During a news conference on Thursday in Abuja, Nigeria, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, the national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), is said to have accused six party officials of stealing almost 7 billion Nigerian naira (N7).
The chairman of the APC stated that he had a history of corruption, unpaid pay, and “ghost workers” before he was appointed to his current post. He said that as a consequence of this, he was compelled to issue the directive that ordered the directors to take an annual leave of absence from their duties.
Keep in mind that Adamu issued an order on April 22 mandating that directors take an annual leave of absence as soon as they were sworn in to their positions.
As a direct consequence of this, the chairman of the party decided to form an investigation team, which would be overseen by Ali Kudu, a former governor of Jigawa State. This team’s mission would be to investigate the documents that were turned over by the defunct Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee.
In its report to Adamu, the panel recommended that the leadership of the party take the action of suspending the departmental directors and the head of legal services for an undetermined amount of time.
On Thursday, Adamu briefed media at the party’s headquarters on the decision he had made to suspend the directors in order to clean up the system and eliminate corruption.
The national head of the APC has debunked allegations that he stacked the board of directors with his friends and family.
In an interview with The Punch, Abubakar Suleiman, the administration director who was fired, refuted allegations of corruption and highlighted that the development had been pre-planned. Suleiman also emphasized that the situation was pre-planned.
Suleiman asserted that the NWC under Adamu had provided them with notice of the alleged infraction prior to issuing the directive that they take “compulsory yearly vacation.”
“Adamu lied,” he observed. There was not a single problem, my sibling. The secretariat is in charge, and they can handle it. We did not know what motivated him to make that decision, and neither did anyone else.
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That was the point of it. No one was accused of anything. You must have heard the same thing from other people as well, I’m sure. Absolutely nothing went wrong anywhere.
“As directors, we are not authorized to approve anything. We were responsible for putting the plan into action.
In addition, Suleiman denied the notion that N7.7 billion had been lost by asserting that neither money nor ghost workers were at the headquarters. He stated that this was the case.
Nothing even close to it, he pointed out. Nobody has any knowledge of the 7.7 billion Naira that you say he mentioned. There was no instance of missing cash. Additionally, there were no phantom workers to be discovered anywhere.
You can see that every individual who is working at the secretariat has the appropriate letters of engagement. At the time that we left, there were around 211 people working for the company.
According to a copy of the letter the party’s national secretary issued to them, the proposals that were included in the report of the Transition Committee that Adamu created resulted to their expulsion from their positions.
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Superman lamented the fact that despite writing a letter to President Muhammadu Buhari and copying the APC presidential candidate Bola Tinubu, members of the Progressive Governors Forum, members of the National Executive Committee, and party leaders, nothing was done about the expulsion of the individuals in question.
“I’m sure that all of these conversations about bribery and other issues were just an afterthought on someone’s part. Only the fact that it was done so on the committee’s advice was included in the letter of suspension.
