Kano State Governor, Abba Kabir Yusuf, has responded to his predecessor, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, over his claims of failure in governance in the current administration, insisting that Ganduje’s eight-year tenure represented failure and maladministration, following massive records of corruption, diversion of public funds and sale of government properties that characterised it.
Yusuf, in a statement issued by his spokesperson, Sanusi BatureDawakinTofa, and made available to journalists, yesterday, regretted that Ganduje spoke about non-existent failure in the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) government instead of facing the nemesis of corruption and political violence hanging around his neck.
The governor insisted that Ganduje presided over two unproductive tenures characterised with the siphoning of public resources, inability to cater for the needs of Kano’s population, nepotism and bloodshed that left many families in a state of melancholy.
“Our eight months in office have remarkably outweighed Ganduje’s eight wasted years of political caricature and maladministration by all standards,” Yusuf stated.
He advised the acting National Chairman of All Progressives Congress (APC) and the immediate-past governor of the state to rather buckle up in defence of his battered image at the court instead of further exposing his impunity in the media space.
The statement further regretted that Ganduje could yet muster the courage to defend himself in the media despite the embarrassing video clip where he was caught, red-handed, stocking his large agbada pockets with dollars, a supposed kickback from a contractor, and other corrupt practices massively associated with his eight-year tenure during which he ran the affairs of Kano State as a family enterprise.
“We wish to reaffirm the current administration’s resolve and readiness to make Ganduje and his co-travellers face the full wrath of the law for their intentional wrongdoings,” the statement added.
Yusuf, however, maintained that his administration is multifacetedly inclined, focusing on socio-economic and physical infrastructure developments for the overall well-being of Kano people.
Yusuf emphasised that it would leave no stone unturned in pursuing the dollar video scandal to its logical conclusion. He, therefore, requested the release of the forensic investigation conducted by the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFFC) on “Gandollar saga” in 2018 for public consumption.
On the allegations of poor governance in Kano despite the increase in federal allocation, Yusuf revealed that his administration is still struggling to recover from the state of bankruptcy Ganduje plunged the state in the last eight years.
The governor stressed that apart from inheriting liability and debt running into over N300 billion from Ganduje’s administration, the immediate past All Progressives Congress (APC) government sold almost all the property and assets to Ganduje, members of his family, and his cronies.
Yusuf revealed that his government has recorded life-changing initiatives to the people of Kano, part of which include the foreign post-graduate scholarship for first-class students, payment of tuition fees and entrance examinations for hundreds of thousands of university and secondary school students, which Ganduje never thought of doing in his eight years in office; free maternal and child healthcare, renovations and equipping of some secondary healthcare facilities, including HasiyaBayeroPaediatric Hospital, which was recovered from Ganduje’s crony, who was allocated the over N6 billion worth hospital at the cost of N6 million, among other modest achievements that have impacted positively on the lives of Kano people.
