Abia State Governor, Alex Otti, has revealed how the former state government led by Okezie Ikpeazu paid billions of Naira to build an airport that does not exist and other unexecuted projects in the state.
He revealed this at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, United States, where he gave a lecture on the topic ‘State Governance and Economic Transition: Meeting the Challenges’, and disclosed that he engaged one of the top three auditing firms in the world to audit the spending of the former governor.
According to the reports submitted by the auditing firm, Otti said, “When we’re talking about corruption, I had set up a forensic audit as soon as I took over last year in Abia and so that there won’t be any argument, I called in one of the top three audit firms in the world and not too long ago, they turned in their reports.
“And some of the things in the report are frightening. 79.3 billion naira was paid to seven contractors for contracts that were not executed at all up till today. Another 15.9 billion, was paid to 63 contractors with no supporting documents anywhere in the state.
“Another 12 billion naira was paid to two contractors for contracts that do not exist. Out of this figure, 10 billion naira was on September 25, 2020, and that is almost four years, paid to some contractors for the construction of Abia State Airport.
“We have spent time trying to locate the airport and up till now, we have failed. In fact, one of my aides told me the other day that may be we’re using native intelligence to look for the airport, that we should seek artificial intelligence.
“So, as we continue to look for our airport, we have also involved the security agencies to help us search. So, that’s just an example of what typically happens, and when you juxtapose that wave, pensions unpaid for about 10 years, and salary arrears, the 10 billion that was spent to build the nonexistent airport was exactly the amount of money that our government used to take off the pension arrears.
