Aisha Yesufu tackles Labour Party chairman, Abure, over alleged embezzlement of party funds

RIPPLES NIGERIA

Social critic and co-founder of the #BringBackOurGirls movement, Aisha Yesufu, has responded to allegations by the embattled national chairman of the Labour Party (LP), Julius Abure, that she and Pastor Itua Ighodalo, the brother of Edo State PDP governorship candidate, Asue Ighodalo, were responsible for managing the party’s campaign funds in the 2023 general election.

Abure who made the allegations during a press briefing after the party’s National Executive Committee meeting in Abuja on Monday, denied accusations that he mismanaged the party’s funds, blaming Yesufu and Ighodalo of embezzling the funds running into N3.5 billion.

According to Abure, the party never had access to the accounts opened for donations to support its candidate, Peter Obi, insisting that only Yesufu and Ighodalo were signatories to the accounts.

“The party was never involved in the distribution of those resources. Our interest was to see how we could produce a president for the party. How it was done was not our concern,” Abure had said.

“Hence, we gave them free rein. We allowed them to entrust their resources to whomever they wanted. We followed them loyally by allowing them to administer the campaign funds.

“Regarding donations, the party was not involved in collecting any campaign donations; they were channelled to accounts opened for campaign purposes, with Aisha Yesufu and Pastor Itua Ighodalo as the signatories.

“They were also responsible for payments to polling unit agents. The party did not handle the payments to the agents. We handed over the list to the campaign council and those administering the funds to pay the agents who worked for the presidential election. Consequently, it is mischievous for anyone to accuse me of mismanagement of the party’s funds,” he stated.

But in a rebuttal to the allegations, Yesufu, in an X post on Tuesday, said Abure was lying as she did not embezzle the funds of the party during the campaign for the 2023 election.

In the post, she said Abure was still living in the past where he thinks one can make such allegations without being fact-checked for its authenticity.

“Julius Abure thinks we are still in 1980 where one can lie shamelessly without being fact checked,” she wrote.

In another tweet, Yesufu dug up Abure’s post on X in 2022, in which he asked people to take ownership of the party’s campaign by donating a minimum of N1,000 to the Labour Party account.