No ministers paid billions for appointments, APC insists

By Dickson Omobola The All Progressives Congress, APC, Wednesday, denied claims that ministers pay billions of Naira to secure appointments, saying comments made by its Presidential Campaign Council spokesperson, Alwan Hassan, referred to historical practices rather than the current administration. Hassan had alleged that some ministers pay billions of naira to secure appointments and subsequently seek to recover the money.

Speaking during an interview on Arise TV, Hassan said: “The way Asiwaju is hands-on on the expenditure of our revenue is fantastic and I love it. A lot of ministers pay billions and billions, and, you know, to get themselves appointed. The first thing they think of is how to recoup that money.” Reacting to the statement, which has generated backlash, National Publicity Secretary of APC, Felix Morka, questioned how ministers who allegedly paid billions to secure appointments would recover such sums within Nigeria’s budgetary framework.

Speaking on Primetime, an Arise TV programme, Morka said Hassan had explained that his remarks were not directed at the current administration but were made in a historical context. His words: “What he was referring to was not really about this administration, but he was speaking in historical context. What he said left a lot of ambiguity, some have suggested that he was speaking about appointments.

He was clear as well when he said that what he was describing predated APC. As a citizen listening to him, I thought he was simply conflating systems. When he came back and said it predated the APC, that suggested to me that his frame of thought was really located, not in the present, but really in the past. “When you are a public commentator, sometimes you generalise without really specifically drawing those lines of distinction between moments.

If I say there’s corruption in Nigeria, I’m not necessarily saying that this government is corrupt. am not here to sort of overanalyse or justify comments. I think that, in due time, he alone will have to come tell what he had in his mind. But from talking to him, what I understood, after the fact, was that he was simply speaking historically, to say that ministers generally in our country have had this really terrible record of engaging in that behaviour.

“If ministers are paying billions to get appointed, how exactly, within what we know to be Nigeria’s budgetary frame, do you recoup the billions you paid to get appointed? I don’t think that is really something that, personally, I am willing to even imagine. He made a comment in historical context, as he explained it. In other democracies, lobbying for appointments is not something unusual.

In the United States, there are firms that are contracted to lobby for individuals to get appointed to office. Those are usual things that happen in the background.prior to appointments. “I think the concern here is that when lobbying becomes monetised, where people pay money to operators or to individuals with influence to procure appointments, that I think is what is really wrong.”