By 
Administration gets knocks all over
By John Eche
Considerable uproar has broken out on the Nigerian social media circuit over the reported approval of a proposed ‘disbursement’ of $1billion from the controversial Excess Crude Account by state governors to fight the Boko Haram insurgency in the North East.
Lamenting that the Excess Crude Account was yet unknown to the constitution and the appropriation regime in the country, the critics of the new development are therefore declaring that it is an illegality. They equally note that given the ‘sworn’ commitment of the Muhammadu Buhari administration to fight corruption in all of its ramifications, it should therefore not be associated with expenditure matters that are outside the purview of the established budgetary streams which the present ‘approval’ patently is.
They also take exception to the fact that an insurgency that the present administration has continually declared to be technically defeated would be requiring such humongous sums to now quash.
Some of the critics are even going as far as insinuating that the said fund was being taken out to be used to finance President Muhammadu Buhari’s purported second term bid.
Here is a sample of the outbursts as gleamed from Twitter:
$1 billion is to be taken from the badly depleted Excess Crude Account to “fight Boko Haram“. This is a lie. The $1 billion will be used by Buhari and his APC to fight the 2019 presidential election and part of it will be shared between party leaders and the cabal.
N360bn is equivalent to what the Federation Account Allocation Committee share to the FG, 36 States and 774 LGs monthly. Nigerians deserve proper explanations from the FG on the rationale behind spending such huge sum of money to fight an already defeated Boko Haram.
For posterity sake, I wish to place it on record that I was not among the governors, who approved the withdrawal of $1bn, almost half of our savings in the Excess Crude Account, which belongs to the three tiers of govt to fight an already defeated Boko Haram.
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