The Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, has alleged that most of the N1tn budgeted for the Social Investment Programme of the Federal Government is being diverted into private pockets by those implementing it, The Punch can report.
Governor Mohammed was quoted making the allegations in his speech while flagging off the distribution of empowerment materials to selected beneficiaries in the Dambam Local Government Area of the state under the Kaura Economic Empowerment Programme.
“We interact with the majority of our people, especially those who voted for us and those we want to vote for us in 2023, and that is why we are empowering them, remembering them, ensuring that we deepen the universally known and acclaimed ‘PDP Reward System’ that has been abandoned by this administration.
“In the same way, I am grateful to the members of the state Assembly, our commissioners, our appointees; they are precisely doing what I am doing today in their own way and means; we are very grateful. That is what is absent in the APC administration. They may have so many appointees, but you can hardly see them.
“Their (APC) economic empowerment is so huge but it is not reaching anywhere and I want it to be conveyed to the Presidency. The Social Investment Programme is not working. We have our colleagues at the national level; we have our appointees who are arresting everything into their pockets, they don’t have anything like this (Kaura Economic Empowerment Programme) to show, whereas, a trillion naira is budgeted for that.
“And even where they are distributing, I want to be contradicted, you will normally share with those responsible for giving out these empowerments. If it is N50,000, they put N25,000 and pocket the remaining.
“We are calling on our President to shine his eyes, to look very well; he has good intentions, but his intentions have consistently been thwarted by those around him. He must not take this because change is the only thing that is dynamic”, the governor said.
