- He said he doesn’t want people to see the state legislative body as a bunch of plaint lawmakers and rubber stamp legislators
Speaker of Kaduna State House for Assembly, Yusuf Liman, has opened up on why the House is probing the loans taken by the administration of the immediate past governor of the state, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai.
Liman spoke on Tuesday after the House set up a 13-man committee on fact-finding of financial dealings, loans and grants, and other project implementations from 2015-2023 under El-Rufai’s tenure.
He assured that the matter would be properly and diligently examined, adding they will give each and everyone fair hearing and no one would be victimised or ridiculed in the course of the investigations.
He said he doesn’t want people to see the state legislative body as a bunch of plaint lawmakers and rubber stamp legislators.
“We just want to analyze the last administration’s spendings so that we can stand with our shoulders high by the time we finish from the assembly, we do not want anyone to call us rubber stamp legislators, we are not going to do this investigation to ridicule anybody, but we will do the right thing,” he said.
This is coming two weeks after El-Rufai’s successor, Senator Uba Sani, stated that his predecessor bequeathed a huge debt burden of $587 million, N85 billion, and 115 contractual liabilities to his administration.
Governor Sani lamented that due to the rise in the exchange rate, the state is now paying back almost triple of what was borrowed by the previous administration.
Explaining that the huge debt burden eroding into the state’s federal allocation, he said N7bn out of the N10bn federal allocation for the state in March was deducted to service the state’s debt.
The governor further lamented that the state was left with N3bn, an amount he said was not enough to pay salaries, as the state’s monthly salary bill stood at N5.2 billion