Ganduje, Kwankwaso bicker over LGs 5km road projects
Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje of Kano State has accused his predecessor, Senator Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, of leaving a liability of N54.4 billion for the five-kilometre road projects across the 44 LGAs of the state.
But Kwankwaso described it as an “incredible and phantom allegation”, saying Ganduje, as then deputy governor and also commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs in charge of the road projects should be the one answering questions as regards them.
The state Commissioner for Information, Malam Muhammad Garba, in a release on Sunday, had said the State Executive Council had received the report of the “Technical Committee to assess the 5km road projects all of which were awarded by the previous administration under the defunct Ministry of Land and Physical Planning with the state Urban Planning and Development Authority (KNUPDA) as supervising agency.”
Daily Trust reports that the committee was raised after an exclusive report by the paper exposing the state of the projects.
Garba said the committee visited 39 local governments where its detailed report indicated awarded contract sum for the projects, present site conditions, value of executed works, the amount certified and amount released for the projects.
He said the 5km projects in three local governments were revoked and rewarded due to non-performance in Warawa, Ungogo and Dawakin Tofa, while some portions of the projects in Tsanyawa and Bichi along Kano-Katsina road were released to the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing based on request from the federal government.
He said three other projects in Rimin Gado, Karaye and Bunkure local governments that fall within the main arterial highway were expunged from the main project and re-awarded separately for execution, while metropolitan local governments of Dala, Nassarawa, Gwale, Municipal and Tarauni were allotted various projects within the municipality as 5km projects.
But reacting to the allegation, Kwankwaso, who spoke through his former commissioner for State Affairs and deputy governorship candidate of the PDP in the 2019 election, Aminu Abdussalam Gwarzo, said: “Thank God it was Ganduje who was the Commissioner of Ministry of Local Government, he was in charge of the entire project.
“It was his (Ganduje) ministry that was supervising the project and making recommendations for payments to contractors.”
He admitted that most of the projects were left uncompleted, but what the Kwankwaso administration did was payment of 30% as “mobilisation fee and if you exhaust it and sufficiently prove that you have done something beyond the initial 30% you collected, then you make a claim and it is paid. Unfortunately for Ganduje, all these processes were strictly done in his ministry.”
“As far as we are concerned, we don’t know of any liability of any N54 billion. Maybe they are now trying to cook up something,” he said.