Gov Masari’s Eleven Billion Naira Lie

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

It is more than one week now since Premium Times carried a very shocking story in which the Katsina State Governor and one of the leading lights of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr. Aminu Bello Masari, was accused of brazenly deploying a false claim to get his state included on the list of the 27 insolvent states that would require the federal bailout approved by President Muhammadu Buhari for the payment of arrears of salary owed to workers in those states. The governor had claimed that by the time he assumed office, workers in his state were being owed two months’ salary and due to the almost empty treasury he met on ground, he would not be able to settle the salary arrears unless he got the federal bailout.

*President Buhari and Gov Masari 

The truth, however, as discovered by Premium Times, is that Katsina State “had no business being among the group of insolvent states in need of federal bailout to pay workers salary arrears. Katsina State civil servants as well as workers in the state’s 34 local governments received their full salaries and allowances up to May when Mr. Masari became governor.”

Now, in the absence of any form of refutation from Mr. Masari’s office to such a credibility-shattering report, one can safely assume that the governor had, indeed, told that horrendous lie and that he is only deploying the weapon of silence to allow the revolting scandal to quietly go away. What should even be more worrisome now is: if Governor Masari could unleash such a bare-faced lie to deceive the federal government into giving him an N11 billion bailout, how can anyone be sure that the money would not simply disappear into a black hole and he would quickly manufacture an even bigger lie to explain away its disappearance?