Atiku’s daughter makes Adamawa cabinet list

Fatima, a daughter of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, was among the 21 persons named by the Adamawa State Governor, Mohammed Jibrilla, as commissioner nominees.
Sources told Daily Times that she will be considered for the post of Commissioner for Health, being a Veterinary Doctor.
Fatima’s nomination was approved by the Assembly although she did not attend the legislative hearing.
She is believed to be in the delegation of the Governor which is currently on a trip outside the country.
Other nominees are Ibrahim Yayaji Mijinyawa; a Governorship aspirant on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the last general election, who was also believed to be an acolyte of the former vice president.
The Muhammadu Buhari administration has resolved to engage the services of two foreign auditors to investigate the immediate past government led by Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.
This decision was announced in Abuja on Thursday at the inaugural meeting of the investigation committee constituted by the National Economic Council (NEC) to look into the finances of the outgone government.
The committees are headed by the Governors of Kaduna and Edo states, Mallam Nasir el Rufai and Comrade Adams Oshiomhole respectively.
The forensic foreign auditors are to determine how much accrued to the Federal Government between January 2010 and the end of last year.
Already, some revenue generating agencies have been invited to brief the committee..
The probe will include the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the Nigerian Extractive Transparency Initiative (NEITI), and the Central Bank of Nigeria, among others.
Oshiomhole and the former Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who was also the co-ordinating Minister of the Economy have in the last few weeks been engaged in public disagreement on how the finances of the country were handled by the former government.
Oshiomhole accused Okonjo-Iweala of withdrawing $1bn from the Federation Account, to fund the re-election bid of former President Jonathan. He also disclosed that some senior officials of the United States government confirmed that a top minister in the Jonathan government stole about $6 billion dollars.
Oshiomhole at a seminar organised by his administration for permanent secretaries, directors and deputy directors on enhancing internally generated revenue in the state, said:
“The truth is, many things went wrong even at the federal level. As you might have read in the papers while the Federal Government, under Goodluck Jonathan, with the then Coordinating Minister of the Economy liked to blame ‘governors’ for wasteful spending; for not saving for the rainy day; for not investing properly, the truth is the real weakness in the Nigerian federal chain has been the Federal Government.
Our hope is that with the new President, given his pedigree, we will break from the past. As I am sure you will soon begin to hear when all the numbers are published. Last week, I complained aloud that Edo State lost about N10bn over a four-year period from only one source – the NLNG remittance to the Federation Account.
How did I arrive at the figure? I used my Four-Figure Table and I asked myself at $2.1bn remitted by NLNG, as taxes, and Shell. And by the way, Shell is not the only oil operative; we have Chevron and several others. They shared the $2.1bn based on the revenue allocation formula, Edo State got about N2.27bn. So I said, thank God this money came after the departure of Okonjo-Iweala and President Jonathan. If the PDP were still in charge in Abuja, this money would have been taken.
That is not the only money Edo State Government has lost. You have heard of the last instalment of $4.1bn that was in the Excess Crude Account as of November, 2014, and from that time till today, we have not, when I say we– federal, states and local governments have not touched that money. We have not agreed to take anything out of it, and yet it has been drawn down to about $2bn, which means $2.1bn disappeared.
But if you talk to those oil marketers, they will tell you that within that period, they were paid $1bn, not $2.1b. So in truth, about $1bn was taken for election purposes and Edo State’s share of that should have been about N4.6bn from that $2.1bn that Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Minister of Finance illegally took from Excess Crude account.
Governments have lost a lot of money and the $2.1bn, that is Edo State’s share of that, because that would have included derivation, we would have made about N2.6bn. That, we have lost now to Okonjo-Iweala. Now that she claimed she used it, between herself and the last President, they agreed to take the money to pay oil marketers.”
But Okonjo-Iweala denied the allegation and accused Oshiomhole of playing tricks with figures.
In a statement issued by her Media Adviser, Paul Nwabuikwu, the former finance minister said that Oshiomhole was suffering from numerical diarrhea, describing the allegation as a “ludicrously false statement that has unfortunately become a trademark of the Governor in his public campaign of falsehood.”
“This is just another example of the numerical diarrhea that seems to have afflicted His Excellency in recent times in his effort to damage the reputation of the former Minister.”
He has, within the last few months, asked Okonjo-Iweala to explain all kinds of totally wild and unsubstantiated figures, ranging from $30bn, $20bn, $2.1bn, N720bn and now $1bn.
To say the obvious, the accusations are totally lacking in credibility. Governor Oshiomhole’s published comments also contain other falsehoods.”
Dr Okonjo-Iweala never said the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee approved spending out of the ECA. Rather as the commissioners themselves stated, the former Minister of State Finance informed them that former President Jonathan approved the expenditure to end the debilitating fuel queues across the country.”