- Nasir El-Rufai
Those who have embezzled money belonging to Kaduna State government in the past will soon face the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Governor Nasir el-Rufai has declared.
The governor said the state government will hand over the case files of all looters as soon as EFCC resume operations in their newly acquired Kaduna office.
Governor el-Rufai revealed this while speaking on Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Kaduna live vernacular programme.
el-Rufai said he has been in touch with the chairman of the commission, Ibrahim Magu and keep him up to date on the development.
The governor said, his administration discovered about 250 different accounts belonging to the state government with varied sums of money lodged into them.
Some of the accounts, according to el-Rufai dated back to the military era without subsequent civilian administrations in the state having the knowledge of the accounts.
el-Rufai added that with the introduction of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), the administration has saved the state large chunk of fund, blocked many leakages hitherto used by civil servants and politicians in the state to siphon fund and pilfer workers salaries.
According to him, the state now has in its TSA the sum of N22 billion from which it draws to make up for any shortfall at any given time.
The governor stressed that as a result of the rigorous verification exercise of the state workforce, they now save about N500 million monthly as the monthly wage bill came down from N2.7 billion to N2.2 billion.
He apologised to workers in the state for the inconveniences the verification exercises must have caused them. He assured that the whole workforce in the payroll department was changed for new and fresh hands to give room for accountability and transparency.
