Vanguard
By Henry Umoru
Abdulrazaque Bello-Barkindo is the spokesperson for the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF). In this interview, Bello-Barkindo speaks on the controversy surrounding the Paris Club $418m refund involving the 36 state governors, some consultants and the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Mr Abubakar Malami. Excerpts:
Can we get a historical perspective for people to really understand what is going on, on the controversial $418million Paris Club refund?
What I can tell you clearly is that these debts are said to be incurred by the Association of Local Governments of Nigeria, ALGON, and state governments over jobs that were supposed to have been done. Some of the jobs were forensics, some were legal and some were physical. Some consultants approached some state governments and said “you made overpayments on your Paris Club debts during the return to democracy and if you want to recover the money, we are going to help you”. The consultants went to different states and that’s why we have a plethora of claims from various parts of the country and, when this approval was gotten, the NGF advised all the contractors, all the accountants, all the lawyers who have anything to do with this matter to present their cases. There was a committee that looked at the cases and decided that every contractor or consultant would be paid according to his effort and, by the end of 2018, I think everything was settled. But all of a sudden some people began to come back to claim that they have balances to collect while some said they haven’t been paid at all. Look, we can’t find justification for the claims they are making. So, the Governors’ Forum new leadership decided that “if you think you have any money left with us, we want you to prove what you have done. Now, if you said you constructed boreholes, bring the evidence of those boreholes around the country, if you said you constructed primary health care institutions, where is the evidence?” One of them, I can’t tell you his name, is claiming that during the crisis of the NGF at a time there was an election and one of the governors said he won an election with 16 people over 19 people, he did a review of a 16-page document for then-factional Chairman of the NGF and demanded 47million dollars (N20.2billion at current official exchange rate of about N430 to a dollar) for that job. And the NGF is saying if you did the job for a factional Chairman, go to the faction to collect your money, the faction does not exist today if you go to the NGF Secretariat. So, why are we going to pay 47million dollars for the review of 16 pages of some kind of judgment that is not in our records? So, all the claims, as far as the NGF is concerned, are bogus, but if they are that powerful and they insist that the Attorney-General is working for them and not for the Nigerian people, so be it…
