The Minister of Defense for State, Bello Matawalle, has accused the present administration in Zamfara State of playing a blame game to divert public attention from the alleged failure to protect lives and properties in the state.
Matawalle said it is disheartening for the governor and his cronies to shift the blame on his administration, describing the allegations as shoddy and baseless.
In a telephone interview with The WikkiTimes on Tuesday, Anwar Abdulwali Tahir, former Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to Governor Matawalle, said the recent accusation that his principal siphoned public funds in furnishing uncompleted Governor’s Lodge across the 14 local government areas of the state is baseless as all the projects have been completed before the end of their tenure.
Matawalle, a former governor of Zamfara, insisted that the circulated images of the said projects abandoned are false.
According to him, all the projects the former governor commissioned were already completed, and his principal also awarded the contracts in good faith for the infrastructural development of the whole state.
“When Matawalle was the governor of Zamfara, he awarded contracts, and if you can look at the papers they provided, you will see where he commented ‘ensure due process’, meaning the right procedure has to be followed in the award of contract and even payments to the contractors. So it is left for the contractors and those responsible for the disbursement of the funds to do needful since the Governor has directed them to follow due process”.
“The pictures they produced that the projects were abandoned are not true. What happened is that the buildings they showed were pictures taken when the projects were 70% completed, and they used them while, in the actual sense, the projects have been completed. If you can google it using Google map GPS coordinates, you can see the buildings in each local government.”
“It has been fenced and painted with everything”, said Anwar.
According to him, the present administration is just bent on playing a blame game to divert the people’s attention, not to look at their failure to secure the lives and properties of the people of Zamfara State.
“In the first hundred days of Governor Matawalle, he has done wonderfully and remarkably well compared to their six or five months. When he came in his first hundred days, there was relative peace in Zamfara where you can freely go anywhere in his first hundred days in 2019 because when he assumed office, we were in a critical time of insecurity. When he came on board, he did everything possible to ensure security in the state. He sat with all stakeholders and traditional rulers and even distributed operational vehicles to security agencies to ease their activities. Still, the present administration has done nothing on the security”, he said.
The WikkiTimes recalled that Governor Dauda Lawal on Monday accused his immediate predecessor of siphoning billions of naira in contract awards in violation of public service rules regarding awarding and payment of contracts.
Dauda alleged that some contractors were paid 100 per cent upfront while most received 90 per cent upfront even before starting the projects.
The governor, in a statement by Sulaiman Bala Idris, his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, alleged that the last administration embezzled public funds by intentionally not adhering to the set standards for the awards of contract vowing to recover what is rightfully belong to the people of Zamfara State.
