Excert from Tope Fasua WHO IS SURE OF SURE-P? The SURE-P project is one I never quite understood from get go. I didn’t get the logic of setting up another agency to do what government agencies should ordinarily do. I knew there would be overlaps and counterclaims, and I have seen their signposts in odd places. With the total disappearance of subsidies, it would be apt to disband that agency and repost the staff to their former departments. The place was probably set up to do favours to political cronies. The accounting that led to the ‘savings’ that was passed on to that agency – about $4billion in the last two years I gathered - is at best voodoo accounting. Still, the money has been spent. I got this excerpt from an article in the Punch newspaper: “For instance, the SURE board claimed to have spent N16 billion ($100 million) on the Benin Ore Shagamu road – a project for which the Federal Government had already awarded a N65.2 billion ($400 million) contract in September 2012 – and said it had contributed N9.3 billion ($57 million) to the Lagos-to-Ibadan railway – a development for which a $1.4 billion contract was signed between the Federal Government and the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) in August 2012… “In all of these you will see that they are not in any way financing any new projects”, lamented Senator Danjuma Goje, a member of the Senate Committee on Petroleum. “They are not initiating any new projects, they only put money into existing projects.”” The fact that fraud enveloped SURE-P, which could have stemmed from the confusion leading to its birth, and the voodoo accounting I mentioned above, led to the old guru Christopher Kolade, Mr Integrity himself, resigning from the headship, and recently castigating the president himself. Hear him: “If we get to a point when we do not care how the country is led, we have lost hope. The country is where it is today because some people sacrificed. Unfortunately, beyond stealing, our leaders are not ready to sacrifice anything… Nigeria was, at every other time, better than now!” I weep for this country. But my tears are not one of surrender but of anger. Kolade was shocked to his marrow about what he saw displayed in SURE-P. They intended to make the poor old man a mascot of corruption and tarnish his every record, and where possible, even his soul. He had been used to Nigerians in the private sector, but he didn’t know that the devil himself now resides in the Nigerian public sector, directing the cacophony of looting, killing and insanity going on in there. If you need to see heartless people, try the Nigerian public sector at the moment. The players there believe that Nigeria is on ‘extra time’ and have become ever more vicious in taking whatever they can. The president set a terribly bad tone, which served as a death knell for the anti-corruption fight with his ‘I-don’t-give-a damn’ quip on national TV. It’s been downhill ever since. As if it wasn’t bad enough before. That is the reason why the old man spoke up. He left many things unsaid, the sage that he is. Of course attack dogs went after him. But it was too late.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 00:39:43 +0000
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