How Dogara, 2 APC reps, Ogor attempted to steal N40 billion from 2016 budget

Speaker Yakubu Dogara, his deputy, Yusuf Lasun, Chief Whip Alhassan Doguwa, and Minority Whip Leo Ogor connived to cream off N40 billion in the National Assembly budget. Hon. Adbdulmumin Jibrin, ex-chairman of the House Appropriation Committee, said he thwarted the plot.

This is the latest bombshell Jibrin would hurl at some of his colleagues in the on-going war between him and the Speaker.

Explaining how it happened, Jibrin said when he resisted playing ball in the monkey business, Dogara and three other top officers relocated the committee’s secretariat to a secret place where they did the padding.

He said when the budget harmonisation committee headed by Dep. Speaker Yusuf Lasun gave out 80 percent concession across board to the executive demands during the negotiation, it was agreed the remaining 20 percent would go to the entire NASS.

“In an unprecedented display of greed, Lasun presented to me a hand written note distributing the remaining 20 percent to only principal officers,” Jubrin said. “ Seventy percent of the 20 percent was reserved for Mr. Speaker and himself while the remaining 30 percent went to other principal officers.”

Jubrin, a federal lawmaker from Kano, has said it is not because he was sacked as committee chair that he’s spilling the beans now.

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Jibrin and Dogara used to be best of friends before the current rift reared up in their relationship. Jibrin worked energetically to help Dogara clinched the speakership last year. The Speaker, in turn, paid back by jobbing him into the juiciest of all the commitees in the House

“I have to state these QUARTET have resorted to desperate moves to drag the entirw House of Representative into the case of gross abuse of office I have levelled against them as individual Presiding and Principal Offices of the House,” he said in an email he broadcast Sunday.

He also probably made this revelation because he felt threatened, According to him, the police laid siege on his house on Sunday, demanding budget document, and harassing his family members.

The game plan, he said, was to have him arrested and kept in police net while a heavy media propaganda will be carried out to mislead Nigerians he was sacked and the police have started investigating him.

Dogara has, however, kept his cool, saying he would allow the House deal with the matter institutionally.