Nigerians and indeed the whole world are in for more shockers when the Senate panel which investigated the Presidential Initiative on the North East (PINE) intervention releases its final report on the corruption-ridden scheme set up by President Muhammadu Buhari to ease the sufferings being experienced by victims of the Boko Haram insurgency in that part of the country.
Senator Shehu Sani, who headed the Senate investigative panel, stated this on Friday during an appearance on the Morning Breakfast Show, Kaaki, on Africa Independent Television (AIT), monitored by The Dream Daily Newspaper in Kaduna. He said the full report would be released when the Senate resumes from its Easter break.
The PINE scandal has already claimed the scalp of Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Mr. Babachir Lawal, who has been suspended from office by President Muhammadu Buhari pending fresh investigation for allegedly awarding PINE contracts running into hundreds of millions to his own companies.
The suspended SGF, according to Senator Sani, was a major financier and backer of President Buhari’s successful fourth-time bid for the Presidency in the 2015 Presidential Election.
Senator Sani told Kaaki’s Anchor, Salamatu Ibrahim, that many of the companies which landed contracts worth billions of naira under PINE have no fixed addresses, giving rise to conjectures that they were simply fronts for powerful people in government to cream off billions of naira in the guise of helping internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other victims of Boko Haram terrorism in the North East.
As teasers, Senator Sani clarified that the amount allocated to the infamous grass-cutting saga under PINE, which the suspended SGF allegedly awarded to a firm he had interests in, was more than the N270 million widely reported by the media: “It is over N500 million in fact. The N270 million was just the first or initial part of the grass-cutting contract, which Nigerians have chosen to make the face of the corruption in PINE. Nigerians will also see in our report that these people allocated N2 million to feed the IDPs but provided N50 million for conferences for themselves and NGOs to speak about the IDPs; how do you reconcile that?” the radical-progressive Senator asked incredulously.
Senator Sani also expressed misgivings over the fresh panel set up by President Buhari to probe the suspended SGF, which is now headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.
Specifically, the senator stated that the investigation ought to have been handed over to an anti-corruption agency like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) or the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), instead of the Executive investigating its own powerful members over the alleged corruption.
Senator Sani also took exception to the presence of the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) cum Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN) on the Osinbajo Panel. He argued that the outcome of the panel’s decision might be compromised in favour of the corruption committed by the powerful under PINE and against the Nigerian People by Malami’s presence on the panel because the AGF had earlier cleared the SGF of any wrongdoing on the same matter when President Buhari directed Malami to query Lawal over his links with the grass-cutting contract.
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