We’ve been vindicated over probe of ex-Enugu officials, says APC

THE All Progressives Congress (APC) in Enugu State yesterday said the ongoing investigation of the immediate past administration of Sullivan Chime by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has vindicated its earlier position that his government was corrupt.

Enugu State Chairman of the party, Ben Nwoye, told The Guardian that the state had been very unlucky with her governors since the start of democracy in 1999, stressing that each of the governors so far produced had ended up in EFCC over alleged corruption and looting of public resources.

He stated it was a serious breach of trust and an indication that all those who have risen to govern the state were not the right choice of the people, disclosing that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has failed the state.

Nwoye said: “It shows how unfortunate Enugu has become since the PDP started governing the state. Only recently, Chimaroke Nnamani, who ruled the state for eight years under the PDP, was found to have looted the state dry. We saw how the corporations linked to him pleaded guilty of corruption leading to the court confiscating the corporations. Sullivan Chime took over and people thought he learnt from Nnamani’s mistakes but that is not so. Few days to the exit of his government, he started selling everything, asking for N11 billion loan and selling Water Corporation. We raised the alarm because we realised that his government was corrupt. There was heavy corruption in his government.”

“Before our very eyes, Chime travelled overseas and spent large sums of money for his ill-health. Nobody till date has told us how much resources of Enugu people were involved in that trip. It is a mockery, the loot are stolen in our naked eyes. This man needs to explain how much he spent wherever he went to get his medical treatment. It is outrageous, it was people’s money that he used and nobody wants to say anything. It was not a shock to me that people were saying now that Sullivan is corrupt. It was really a corrupt administration.”

Nwoye called on Ugwuanyi to learn from the mistakes of his predecessors and shun greed so as not to end up like them, adding that the mere fact that the activities of the past government were seriously being investigated had eroded the confidence of the people in the PDP.

On the conviction recently by the court on the property of former governor Nnamani, the APC said: “I call on Governor Ugwuanyi to immediately begin the process of asking the EFCC to release those property to the state. These are property of the masses stolen by someone entrusted with public property. We should not wait for years to make the demand on the EFCC to release all those property since clearly there is no appeal pending on them. Ugwuanyi should get a committee or task force to make a case to the EFCC to release those property and not allow it to be managed by the EFCC as the court will want it to do.”

He called for a review of the immunity clause, saying that governors hide under it to perpetuate corruption, adding that special courts should be set up to try allegation of corruption among public officers rather than waiting until after eight years when the affected officers must have served out their tenure.

Nwoye, who said it was a good omen rumours making the round that Ugwuanyi may appoint administrators for the councils in November this year when the tenure of elected council chairmen would have elapsed, stated that the PDP in the state had never conducted elections in the councils before now, adding that the party had a hidden agenda in the guise of conducting elections to “loot resources of the state and in the end handpicked people into the positions.”