Subsidy Probe: There Will Be No Sacred Cow -Tambuwal

The House of Representatives this morning began the debate on the Farouk Lawan report of the probe into the management and abuse of the fuel subsidy fund by government officials in collaboration with contractors with the Speaker Hon Aminu Tambuwal declaring that there will be no sacred cow.

As at press time, the house had adopted some of the recommendations of the report.

The speaker in his remark to kick start the debate on the report urged the members to contribute to the deliberation dispassionately in the interest of the country.

Tambuwal warned that there must be no sacred cow in the patriotic drive to sanitise the country of corruption and bare-faced looting.

He then urged the anti-graft agencies to proceed to prosecute those found culpable, adding that the subsidy regime was hijacked and carried out in the interest of a selected few.

The speaker, who noted that the recognition of the importance of the report was the reason the House dedicated the entire order paper to the item maintained that the committee handled the probe with integrity and sense of patriotism.

The chairman of the ad-hoc committee on the monitoring of the subsidy regime, Farouk Lawan opined that the sector stinks with so much corruption going on within most of which could not be delved into by the committee as their activities were only limited to the subsidy regime.

Even at that, Farouk said the committee discovered mind boggling corruption, brazen fraud, and mindless abuse of due process and other laid down financial rules.

For example, the chairman said they discovered that the sum of N999m was paid 128 times with the details of the recipient shrouded in secrecy, a reason they are inviting the relevant anti-corruption agencies to look into the scam in the sector.

Farouk maintained that since 1999, no investigation into the oil sector has been conclusively conducted as the players in the industry would do anything to fraustrate the process.

This he said was one of the challenges encountered by the committee in the course of the probe.

—Desmond Utomwen/Abuja