The House of Representatives, on Tuesday, directed the supervisory Boards of Tafawa Balewa Square (TBS), International Trade Fair Complex, as well as management of National Examination Council (NECO) to halt the sale and concession of all properties within and outside the country, pending the conclusion of the ongoing investigation of all Federal Government’s abandoned properties.
Chairman, House of Representatives’ Ad-hoc Committee probing Federal Government’s properties, Hon Ademorin Kuye, issued the directive during the review of the report of the sub-Committee set up to draw the action plan.
Hon Kuye, who expressed concern over the level of impunity being displayed by some of the public service officers and management team of most of the concessioned properties, alleged that “there are surreptitious moves to sell off some of the property by certain elements in a bid to spanner the efforts of the committee.
“As a result of the media coverage, the general public have been sensitised on the task before us. The successful recovery of these properties will definitely provide the needed funds to cushion the impacts of economic crunch this country is facing, at this challenging time of COVID-19 pandemic.
“The die is cast. We are therefore soliciting the cooperation of the Ministries, Departments and Agencies concerned to avail us a comprehensive list of the Federal Government’s abandoned properties, be they land, building, aircraft, ships or goods to enable the committee discharge its mandate.
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“In the same vein, we are equally calling corporate organisations and individuals already occupying and making use of these properties to do the needful by liaising with the committee to put necessary machinery in motion to return them to the rightful owner, the Federal Government.
“We are not oblivious of surreptitious and hurried attempt to dispose those properties as a way of throwing spanner in the works of this committee,” Hon Kuye noted.
He observed that after the privatisation exercise by the government of some of the corporations like PHCN, NITEL, NIPOST, there are still some non-core assets that are left with the government.
“These non-core assets are what we are looking at because they are still very much the assets of the Federal Government and they are lying down low out there all over the place with nobody taking proper care of them, nobody using them; they are being inhabited by criminals and hoodlums all over the place.
“So those are the things we are talking about. And we have those kinds of assets in Nigeria even outside Nigeria. We are doing a letter and telling Nigerians that pending the time that we’ll conclude our investigation on those assets, nobody must deal with it, except through us. These assets are all over Nigeria.
“We have the TBS, we have the International Trade Fair at Alaba, we have assets all over here in Abuja so many of them here and don’t forget that at a time of running the country on the basis of 12 States, remember that we used to have federal secretariats in the capital of those 12 states like Ibadan, Jos, like we have in Benin, Lokoja, they are all over, we are working on all of these,” Hon Kuye stressed.
and then