Senate To Obasanjo-'You Are A Liar on Corruption Allegation

The senate has accused Former president Obasanjo of trying to denigrate the sactity of the house of assembly by accusing them of syphonining public funds through the so called constituency project.
The Senate also claimed that it was Obasanjo’s administration which approved that the constituency projects be built into the national budget which was executed by the executive and challenged Obasanjo to furnish Nigerians with details of how the National Assembly members became executors of the national budget, rather than being law makers.


Chief Obasanjo had on Wednesday during a book launch in Abuja, accused the federal lawmakers of corruption. He said: “Apart from shrouding the remunerations of the National Assembly in opaqueness and without transparency, they indulge in extorting money from departments, contractors and ministries in two ways. They do so during visits to their projects and programmes and in the process of budget approval when they build up budgets for ministries and departments who agree to give it back to them in contracts that they do not execute. They do similar things during their inquiries.”obasanjo


According to the former president, “corruption in the National Assembly also includes what they call constituency projects, which they give to their agents to execute but invariably full payment is made with little or no job done. In all this, if the executive is not absolutely above board, the offending members of the National Assembly resort to subtle or open threat, intimidation and blackmail. When the executive pays the huge money, normally in millions of dollars, all is quiet in form of whitewashed reports that fail to deal effectively with the issues investigated”.

Responding to Chief Obasanjo’s allegations, the Senate, speaking through the chairman of its Committee on Information, Media and Public Affairs, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, described the allegation of corruption against it by the former president as unfortunate and an attempt to tarnish the image of the National Assembly.

The Red Chamber said in the statement that it was unfortunate that the former president would distort the issue of constituency projects to mean a direct monetary advance to lawmakers and thus amounting to the “promotion of corruption” by the National Assembly.