The Democratic Peoples’ Alliance (DPA) have given kudos to the Lagos State House of Assembly for wading into the controversy surrounding the €25 million (about N4.75 billion) Sunborn Yacht and the crisis in the Lagos State University (LASU).
However, the party warned the House against sweeping the reports under the carpet as happened with the stalled 2007 probe of local government executives, a report that never saw the light of day.
In a statement by its Director of Publicity, Felix Oboagwina, DPA said last week’s intervention signified the state legislators’ commitment to taking their oversight function seriously and defending the interests of the people.
Advising the State Legislature not to allow the salient issues of the two cases to be swept under the carpet in the name of party loyalty, DPA recalled that in 2007, the House’s Committee on Public Accounts (Local) had recommended the suspension of five Local Government Executive Secretaries for mismanaging N700 million council funds in three months, a probe that has remained buried with the punishment never carried out.
In the words of the party: “Lagos would have been better run with greater accountability and less impunity if the Executive had been held in check this way by the House. Such scrutiny by the House will further promote the checks and balances enshrined in the Nigerian constitution, curtail the excesses of the Executive and guarantee the survival of democracy.”
According to DPA, it was particularly important that Lagosians be told the real facts about the state’s involvement in the acquisition in February last year of the erstwhile London-based €25 million “Sunborn Yacht” renamed the “Lagos Yacht Hotel.”
“As at now, the whole affair of this 10-year-old fairly-used boat casts a serious credibility noose around the state government, especially as Tokunbo Afikuyomi, Commissioner for Tourism and Inter-Governmental Relations, representing Governor Babatunde Fashola at the contract-signing event held in London, and later at a Press Conference in Eko Hotel, where he told the Press that the project was ‘a Public Private Partnership (PPP) initiative’ and that the state government had beaten the cities of Doha and Dubai that had equally bid for the boat,” DPA said.
On the LASU affair, the party said it was clear that the university’s primary population had lost confidence in the institution’s current leadership.
DPA urged the House to compel the university’s administrators to practice internal democracy, and not follow the bad example of godfathers in the Action Congress in Lagos .
In DPA’s words, “LASU management must know that in a democratic and intellectual environment like a university, policies, programmes, planning and projects must be tailored to meet the greatest good of the greatest majority. In very clear terms, the House must tell LASU administrators to shape up or ship out.”
Meanwhile, the party has urged the Lagos State House of Assembly to scrutinise the Human Rights records of the state government over allegations of illegal detentions and inhuman condition of suspects arrested by various agencies.
Other matters of urgent public attention the party felt required legislative focus include: The pollution of the Alimosho General Hospital, Igando and its environs by effluents from a neighbouring solid-waste dumpsite; the illegal selling off of Lagos properties to private interests; the coroner law; the dilapidated state of Lagos roads; insecurity; etc.
Felix Oboagwina
Director of Publicity, Lagos DPA
08033327355.
