The Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate for Lagos State, Mr. Jimi Agbaje, has dared his APC rival, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, to assure Lagosians that he would probe Alpha-Beta, while describing as insincere his promise to run a transparent budgetary system.
“The day of reckoning is near,” Agbaje said, vowing to probe the state finances, as well as Alpha Beta, the private consultancy that has monopolised the management of the state’s Internally Generated Revenue in the last 19 years.
Similarly, Agbaje promised that as Governor, he would write off the N10,000 TraderMoni loan granted petty businesses in the State, insisting that the grant could be comfortably accommodated by the state’s N34 billion monthly IGR.
Agbaje’s assertion came in a statement in Lagos by his Director of Media and Publicity, Mr. Felix Oboagwina.
Dismissing the APC candidate as trying to hide behind one finger, Agbaje said Sanwo-Olu was being economical with the truth by claiming ignorance, during an interaction with internet media practitioners, that the APC regime had deliberately shrouded Lagos State’s revenue and expenditure in secrecy.
“Can Sanwo-Olu afford to bite the finger that fed him? The answer is obvious. For a Sanwo-Olu who, between 2003 and 2015, served as Commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget, Commissioner for Commerce and Industry, and Commissioner for Establishments, Training and Pensions, to claim ignorance of this perfidy is to take Lagosians for fools. It paints him as someone Lagosians cannot trust with the governorship,” Agbaje said.
Until he beat incumbent Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to pick the party’s governorship ticket, Sanwo-Olu’s latest position was as Managing Director of the Lagos State Development and Property Corporation (LSDPC).
According to Agbaje, Sanwo-Olu was making a vain attempt to hoodwink Lagosians, who know that the Bourdillon cabal controls funds accruing to the State, and would resist any move to scrutinize the books.
“Lagosians will find the APC’s candidate pledge very amusing because citizens know he lacks the political will to make such a decision without clearing with his godfathers in Bourdillon,” the PDP candidate said.
“But Sanwo-Olu’s words clearly show that APC knows the right thing to do but deliberately refuses to do it. Their level of insincerity is unbelievable and they deserve to be rejected at the polls come 2019.”
Recalling that the state government had gone as far as obtaining a Court of Appeal injunction against the ruling of a lower court that made the Freedom of Information Act applicable to Lagos despite the state failing to domesticate the law, Agbaje said it is clear that APC has something to hide.
Promising to write off the TraderMoni loan, Agbaje said the money belongs to the people, and it would be converted into a social welfare scheme.
The Federal government had said that the loans, targeted at small businesses in the states, would be repayable by beneficiaries within six months.
However, the PDP candidate said “an APC Federal Government that has made the lives of citizens complicated through decaying infrastructure and high-flying inflation orchestrated by high pump of petroleum and a devalued Naira lacks the moral right not to subsidise small businesses. And that is what we shall do in Lagos State.”