The APC said looking into the recent activities of the Jonathan’s government was not a witch hunt but part of a standard procedure put in place to ensure that such activities were not capable of jeopardizing the incoming administration’s efforts at fulfilling its electoral promises.
Party officials who confided in Sunday Trust in Abuja said some of the outgoing administration’s policies were unpopular and needed to be looked into.
Two of the officials who pleaded anonymity, in an interview in Abuja, were unanimous in saying that all the leaders of the APC were uncomfortable with the recent last-minute appointments by the Jonathan administration.
“This is a transiting government. It beats my imagination that the President should not resist the pressure to make these appointments. Whose interests is he (President) serving or protecting? Does he want to make our incoming APC administration stupid or bring us into conflict with the people?
“I hope Nigerians are taking tabs and will not accept the blackmail. There is no way many of these appointments can stand. You can see that some of the appointees are square pegs in round holes. So their appointments were not based on merit but party patronage or pecuniary interests,” one of the sources, who was a national leader of the defunct Congress for Progressives Change (CPC) said.
Another source, also a national officer of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) said, the contracts being awarded or those being paid for were mind-boggling. He said the APC national leaders were aware that ‘contractors’ were being paid massively for jobs they claimed were done for the government and that some others were receiving payments in the name of being owed as domestic debt.
“All this boils down to rendering the incoming administration, and by extension, the country insolvent. We have information that the outgoing administration is paying off domestic debts and settling contractors who had been certified to have completed their contracts. What was this administration looking at, all this time owing contractors and deciding to pay them off now?
“We can also see that many of the recent appointments were not supposed to be, in whose interest are those appointment made? All this would surely be revisited. Mind you this will not be done out of hatred or other negative reasons,” he said.
Speaking on the development, Deputy National Chairman (North) of APC, Senator Lawal Shuaibu, said though the present administration is still in charge and constitutionally empowered to lead government, it should still act in good faith.
He said those last-minute decisions can’t stand and would be revisited.
“We are going to revisit these last-minute contract awards and appointments; they cannot stand. I am sure Nigerians would want them revisited. Though they are still in charge, they should have put the collective interest of Nigerians before personal interests. I don’t think they are doing that,” Shuaibu said.
The APC last week in a statement signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed raised an alarm over reported allegations of last-minute looting of the nation’s resources, hurried recruitment into the public service and rushed privatization of key financial institutions by the outgoing President Goodluck Jonathan administration, warning that such egregious actions would have serious repercussions.
He said that apart from the instances of such cases that have been reported by the local media, it has been inundated with calls and messages by concerned Nigerians, alerting it to the unscrupulous actions of some Jonathan administration officials.
-Daily Trust
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