SEASONED SPENDTHRIFT: HOW KWARA LAWMAKER ALLEGEDLY EMBEZZLED OVER N34M SKILL AND ACQUISITION PROGRAMME FUNDS BY ENLISTING GHOSTS AS HIS BENEFICIARIES

Secret Reporters

Constraining corruption in Nigeria seems farfetched as politicians continue to showcase their innate fraudulent characteristics, which is evident in their continuous syphoning of public funds using various illegal means.

One of such cases of this in-depth corrupt practice is that of Abubakar Amuda- Kannike, a House of Representatives member representing Ilorin East and South Federal Constituency Kwara State, who according to a document released by Elite Network for Sustainable Development (ENetSuD) obtained by this online news medium allegedly singlehandedly stomached the proposed N34 million (Thirty-Four Million Naira) allocated for the small and medium scale skill acquisition program which was his 2017 constituency project.

The document released by the Kwara-based Civil Society Organization (CSO) stated that the 50-year-old Abubakar who is a well-known spendthrift, allegedly forged the names of the beneficiaries of the supposed empowerment that was submitted to the Small and Medium Scale Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) who was the project executing agency in order to embezzle the funds meant for the empowerment.

The contract for the project we learned was shared amongst Abilele Industries Limited with the sum of N16,606,000 (Sixteen Million, Six Hundred and Six Thousand Naira) for about 120 people (later discovered to be ghosts attendees), Dile Nigeria Limited having about 40 names on the ghost list and about N17,480,00 (Seventeen Million, Four Hundred and Eighty Thousand Naira) allocated to it while Alhambra Global Services Limited was given over N5,768,400 (Five Million, Seven Hundred and Sixty-Eight Thousand, Four Hundred Naira) with about 95 names submitted on the ghost attendance record.

However, in a glaring fraudulent display of malfeasance SecretReporters gathered that the ghost beneficiaries list which was provided by SMEDAN for Abilele Industries Limited had all 120 names on the attendance sheet uniformly handwritten and signed by the same person.

The other forty (40) participants on the list of Dile Nigeria Limited, when contacted through the mobile numbers provided for verification, denied having knowledge of the existence of such a program talk more of attending same.

Furthermore, it was also alleged that when some of the participants among the 40 who are supposed of Yoruba extraction were contacted via their mobile lines as seen on the attendance, it was discovered that the majority of the voices on the other end of the line were majorly from the far north.

Hon. Abubakar, when contacted, insisted that the training was carried out and in his statement assured that the SMEDAN list of participants was official and authentic.

The contractors who handled the projects, on the other hand, corroborated these allegations by providing the same list which is a replica of the list earlier provided by SMEDAN containing same ghost names.