Secret Reporters No place to hide
Secret Reporters
Former Delta State Governors, James Ibori and Emmanuel Uduaghan must be smiling wherever they are, as they have become Twelve billion Naira richer individually.
This is courtesy of the outrageous budget for 2018 by the state Governor, Ifeanyi Okowa. The budget which is currently undergoing scrutiny by a team of SecretReporters news staff is marred with fraud and outrageous input by various ministries and agencies, hidden in subhead. From the Governor’s feeding to the Secretary to the State Government, bizarre is the name for such allocation to themselves.
In the budget, a staggering sum of N23.1 billion was budgeted to be given to past governors, without proper breakdown. This was surreptitiously named ‘office of the former governors’. According to government house insiders, this is the second time in the State history that this ritual will be done, without the former governors actually benefitting from it. In the year 2017, a secret sum of N19.8 billion was also inserted into the budget to cater for the former governors, but was never uploaded on the state official websites.
Findings revealed that the former governors include only the civilian governors in the State, as the military administrators are exempted. This leaves only Ibori and Uduaghan to enjoy this political booty, as the first civilian governor Delta, Felix Ibru, died two years ago, which prompted the naming of the State secretariat after him.
“This is the only government that has given billions to former governors, when the citizens are leaving in smart poverty. I’m not even sure that these governors are aware that their names have been used to collect billions for the past two years. You have access to Uduaghan and Ibori. They will pick your calls. Call them and find out if Okowa has shared last year money and this year N23 billion to them”, stated a government house source to SecretReporters.
Independent investigations by us authoritatively confirm that the former governors are truly not aware of this. We also gathered that there’s no office like ‘former governors’, as they all operate from their houses and only enjoy the benefits stipulated in the retirement benefit law.
When we called their aides to find out about the reaction of their principals to this, they reverted back on how shocked both principals are. “You are the ones opening our eyes now to this o. Oga has asked us to get him a copy of the budget for him to go through. Perhaps there are other frauds that we don’t even know of”, one of the aides told us.
All attempts to reach the Commissioner for Information and the CPS by our reporter proved abortive as they never picked calls from our official line.
Stay tuned for more expose on the Delta State 2018 budget
