Thursday, March 28, 2024

Sale of Nasarawa assets: APGA, PDP knock Al-Makura

As the Nasarawa State House of Assembly approved a request by Governor Umaru Tanko Al-Makura of Nasarawa State, through a resolution, to sell landed assets of Nasarawa State in Jos, Kaduna and Lagos, the All Progressives Grand Alliance and Peoples Democratic Party have countered the move, describing it as unwise.

Notable assets penciled down by the governor for disposal include Tourism Corporation Headquarters, Bus Terminal-both located in Jos; former Plateau Liaison Office on block A and B, plot 1234, Bishop Oluwole Street, Victoria Island, Lagos and Investment Conference Hotel, Lafia.

These are aside from many other assets of the Nasarawa State Government scattered in Lagos, Jos, Kaduna and in Nasarawa itself.

To this end, the National Secretary of APGA and a former Information Minister, Mr. Labaran Maku, warned banks, private and public companies not to participate in what he described as “criminal sales of Nasarawa properties by Governor Al-Makura.”

Maku made the position of APGA on the planned sales of the state’s assets known in Akwanga, the headquarters of Akwanga Local Government area of the state. “I am sending this as warning to anyone who may want to buy these assets that will be advertised,” he cautioned.

Maku said whoever bought the assets would have themselves to blame in the long run, “as Al-Makura will not be governor forever.

“By 2019, if I recover my mandate and he does not stop these sales, the first thing I will do in Government House is to recover all these assets back to the state,” he vowed.

The former minister, therefore, appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to stop the governor from the planned sales as he claimed that “the state does not have a House of Assembly to take a look at what is happening, as decisions are passed without informing the people.

“Therefore, the National Assembly should take over the Nasarawa State House of Assembly till 2019 because people are pained,” the APGA chief demanded.

Also, the Nasarawa State chairman of the PDP, Mr. Francis Orogu, said elected representatives of the people in the state assembly would be judged by posterity for the role they played in permitting Al-Makura to sell Nasarawa assets.

Orogu said: “It all seems nobody has taken time to see the danger and economic meltdown of the proposed action of Governor Al-Makura. At a time when states and local governments are struggling to outsmart one another in developmental efforts, the reverse is the case with our state.”

The PDP chairman thus called on royal fathers and political leaders in the state to prevail on the governor to stop the action, “because it is not in the best interest of the
state.

“We also sound a note of warning to any person, group or corporate body that may have been contacted in respect of these landed assets of Nasarawa State to desist from doing that, in their own interest; as the matter shall be revisited even if it is allowed to proceed,” Orogu
warned.

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