The DEFENDER can authoritatively report yet another scam in the National Assembly to which, failing to respond, the law makers turn round to label their victims a fraudulent official charged with diversion of agency’s funds.
It will be recalled how Mrs Arume Oteh’s refusal to give bribe to law makers led to her being frustrated and her National Security Commission (NSC confirm or NSE) starved with funds by the National Assembly members who, as punishment for her did not approve her agency’s budgets.
It should however be recalled also that Oteh managed to run the agency till the end, despite the legislators’ unpatriotic show of overzealousness, within the meager among she was permitted by the law to spend from the agency’s account. That was under the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan Administration of the Peoples Democratic Party when Senator David Mark was Chairman of the National Assembly.
The latest of such unfortunate national disgrace is coming now with the Muhammadu Buhari-led Administration where majority All Progressives Congress (APC)’s National Assembly has been ruled by minority PDP’s Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara and who superintend the legislative corruption against, not Aruma Oteh this time but, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, who is currently the Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC).
The House of Representatives Committee on Health Care Services was in the news recently alleging that Prof. Adeyeye, another Nigerian in the Diaspora brought home to serve her father like the former Minister of Finance Kemi Adeosun, of diversion of NAFDAC’s funds to unapproved, an offence, if true, is breach of trust and punishable under the law.
Adeyeye, however, stunned watchers of the development when the NAFDAC, speaking on a TVC television programme on the agency, last week, opened the can worms making Nigerians to see and know what they were being blocked from seeing and knowing by her accusers.
She revealed how some House of Representatives lawmakers demanded bribe from her on her assumption of office and how also they threatened her for refusing to give it to them.
Adeyeye, who disclosed the two ways the agency generates income with largely income from registration of products, said she had been able to virtually all the debts she inherited from the administration before President Buhari brought her in to sanitise the agency, formerly headed by Dr. Paul Orih during the past administration Jonathan.
She also featured in an interview on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily, saying: “When I came to NAFDAC, there were a lot of things that were wrong. Take oversight function or whatever that is done, I was shocked when I was told to give money, I said money for what? Money to the committee that visited us. The Health Care Services Committee of the House of Representatives.”
She stated that the request from the federal lawmakers came at a time the agency was ‘bleeding profusely’ from a paucity of funds.
Beyond shocking, the NAFDAC boss described the day as the worst day of her life as ‘a chief regulator.’
“I said I cannot. For just the visit? I couldn’t believe my ears because it saddens me. Yes, it can be referred to as them asking for a bribe. It saddens me. This is an organisation that was bleeding profusely.
“It wasn’t taken well at all. I was threatened and I couldn’t believe that too, you are threatening me?” She stated.
Reacting to her plight in the hands of the lawmakers on a Journalists Hangout thenceafter, Mr. Babajide Lolade-Otitoju, wondered for what reason should lawmakers demand money from an agency that was living on meager resources, even at all corruption at any level was to be frowned at.
The Journalists’ Hangout on TVC revealed that the lawmakers claimed the N35 million they asked for was for them to organize awareness programme on drug abuse, which Otitoju said was not the business of lawmakers.
“They can advise the agency to organize such awareness but not for the House of Representatives committee to do,” he said, warning that the Nigerian lawmakers were already sending bad signals to other Nigerians in the Diaspora how not to resolve within their minds to want to come home to contribute to development of their father land.
