Lucky Obukohwo, Reporting
The House of Representatives has threatened fire and brimstone to issue an arrest warrant against the Managing Director of the Bank of Agriculture, (BoA) Ayo Sontinrin, the Director-General of the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria, Dr. Abubakar Adamu Dabban, over alleged misuse of humongous N1.2 Trillion Anchor Borrowers Fund.
The chairman, House Committee on Nutrition and Food Security, Chike Okafor, who said this, at the resumed investigative hearing on alleged misuse of N1.2 Trillion agriculture fund, said Sontinrin and Dabban must appear before the panel answer lawmakers query on the fund.
The House, recently mandated its Committees on Nutrition and Food Security and Agricultural Production and Services, Agricultural Colleges and Institutions and Finance to undertake a comprehensive investigation into the alleged misuse of government agricultural interventions by departments, agencies, Schemes and Programmes of the Federal Government outside the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security.
Chike explained that the panel, in previous hearings, had the CBN Participating Financial Institutions (PFIs) still indebted to CBN under the Anchor Borrower Programme.
His words “as the investigations went on, including forensic auditing and
evaluation, few organizations have proven their innocence by honouring the invitations of the Committee, appearing before the Hearings, opening up their books with details answers to our inquiries and going extra miles to show verifiable evidences to support their claim of non-involvement in misuse of
agricultural funding.
Such organizations will be commended in the Committee’s Report to the House, at the end of the.investigations”.
The committee chairman added that ‘on the other hand, the Committee wants to put it in the public Know, that series of letters and invitations sent out to the
following: the Bank of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria, National Agricultural Land Development Council to appear before at the last two Hearings of this Committee, were met with either no response or very flimsy
excuses for non-attendance.
“This is totally unacceptable. The Bank of Agriculture only responded with the excuse of having a new Managing Director and I wrote back to the MD to say, that the bank is an ongoing concern, that having a new MD is not enough reason not to honour the invitation of this panel.
“I sincerely hope that the Bank of Agriculture and the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria will be present tomorrow because the public hearing continues tomorrow. We are not the police but this a quasi-judicial institution. If we don’t see them tomorrow, we would have to invoke all the powers of the parliament to make them appear before us”.