Society Gists

Facts are emerging on why the Federal Government excludes Ogun State from the N45.3 billion Covid-19 Action Recovery and Economic Stimulus Programme (NG-Cares).

Several States in Nigeria filed for returns on what they claimed as expenditure during the pandemic and the FG set up a fact-finding team to probe all such claims.

In the case of Ogun State, the team found out that the bogus claims by the Ogun State government were indeed a cesspit of monumental fraud. For instance, they discovered that the so-called Isolation Centres served as conduits for corruption and corrupt practices where the Secretary to the Government of Ogun State, Tokunbo Talabi became the Procurement Officer. They queried the State Health Commissioner about the setting up of the Isolation Centres and she told them truthfully that she practically knew nothing about purchases and that they should go and ask the SSG.

The Health Commissioner was said to have been livid with rage that someone who does not know anything about health procurement services took charge and started buying substandard items for the setting up of the Centres. The SSG, for instance, went to buy mattresses without covering and they started sewing cloth to cover them. This is not ideal in the medical field. Hospital beds come with certain standards for the protection of patients and to prevent the transmission of sickness.

The FG team also visited some of the so-called Isolation Centres and discovered that save for one or two, all the other centers were just mere window dressing as they never admitted a single patient, while some only hosted one or two in the entire period. Yet, invoices covering hundreds of millions were generated as part of the expenditures. They equally investigated the kind of drugs administered to the patients and discovered they were merely given Chloroquine and Paracetamol, as against the expensive anti-retroviral drugs, Remdesvir which the Ogun State government quoted in its expenses.

What was most baffling to the FG team was how the palliatives supplied by CACOVID were distributed in Ogun State. They saw traces that most of the items meant for the poor and vulnerable were hijacked by Dapo Abiodun’s Commissioner and Political appointees while excluding the civil servants in the relevant ministries and agencies. The politicians in government then turned these items, especially food into political weapons. They further discovered that these items were being moved from one storage warehouse to another and in some cases threw a few items open and encouraged thugs loyal to the government to attack the warehouses to cart away some of those items so that there won’t be any traces about the numbers that the governor and his cronies have converted for themselves. The bulk of these food items however surfaced two years after as expired products which were then shared with the hapless citizens for the election of 2023.

When the FG team looked through the books, they noticed a lot of inflated costs here and there and they, therefore concluded that Ogun state does not deserve and cannot benefit from any reimbursement.