The Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, on Thursday asked ex-President Goodluck Jonathan’s finance minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to “come out clean” on the issue of the $2.1bn Excess Crude Account revenue.
Oshiomhole said that rather than provide answers to pertinent questions on how “accruals into the Excess Crude Account got depleted without the knowledge of the National Economic Council,” and how “monies that were supposed to accrue into the said account cannot be found in it going by the balance sheet provided by the former minister,” Okonjo-Iweala had been “shifting the goal post” in her statements.
The governor, in statement by his Special Adviser on Media and Public Affairs, Prince Kassim Afegbua, said he had nothing “personal” against the former minister, but that her claim that he chose to criticise her because she had turn down a loan request made by his administration was a “blackmail” that would not help her.
He said, “It is instructive at this point in time to state categorically without equivocation that there is nothing ‘personal’ between Okonjo-Iweala and Comrade Adams Oshiomhole in terms of the request by the Edo governor that Okonjo-Iweala should come clean on the issue of revenue that accrued to the Excess Crude Account.
“As much as her spokesman tries to dramatise his response in defence of his boss, he has shown a manifest uninformed disposition to issues of simple economics of naira and kobo. Here is a former minister who has changed her position four times in the last 40 days; each position exposing her dubiety of facts and inherent contradictions in the concocted tales she has been weaving on one simple issue: what happened to the $2.1bn ECA funds?
“How come that the minister finds it convenient to publish allocations to states and local governments, but refused to publish accruals into the same account for us to know the status of the account at any point in time; how much was left from where she was distributing from?
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