Unjustifiable ‘Hoarding’ Of Report Of Abia State Administrative Panel Of Enquiry.
Sunday (Eke) 01-03-2026.
About two years and six months ago, precisely on Tuesday (Afor) 27th July, 2023, in less than two months that Labour Party Administration came into Office in Abia State, the Government, vowing to bring all ‘looters’ to book, inaugurated what it referred to as Abia State Administrative Panel of Enquiry, to recover all ‘stolen assets and funds’ of Abia State. It was headed by one cantankerous woman, who characteristically turned justice upside down by unilaterally declaring one guilty even without hearing from one. Her audacity was so embedded in primitivity and rawness that she issued bench warrants to individuals that were not even served to appear before her panel. She was so pugnacious and totalitarian in her approach, almost being intoxicated with her position, that her panel autocratically refused to be served with Court Orders, in a democracy! Hence some observers viewed the panel as a ‘kangaroo court’.
The kernel of the matter here is that for more than Twenty-nine Months, the State Government has refused to release White Paper resultant of a supposed enquiry by a panel that, in the typical characteristics of the Labour Party Government, ‘must, most probably, have been programmed to cost the State Government Hundreds of Millions of Naira’.
Why should it take the Labour Party Government of Abia State almost Thirty Months withholding a White Paper that should ordinarily not have taken more than Six Months to be released?
Many people had, ab initio, interpreted the setting up of the Panel as a crude pursuit of vendetta and vindictiveness by the State Government, and true to such interpretation, the withholding of the White Paper on the kangaroo panel’s unnecessarily expensive and wasteful engagement, only confirms such weird preoccupation.
Equity Global Reporters Ltd vehemently holds the view that a Government that people have continued to lose confidence in due to complete lack of transparency and accountability, should, for once, let the public know the outcome of a panel that has, most strangely unusually, lasted for more than Two Years And Seven Months. Could it mean there are no advisers in the Government or the advisers, as widely rumoured, are so lily-livered, timid and incapacitated that they dare not make the least attempt of advising against impunity?
In the same vein, it is the candid opinion of the Online News Medium that the Government should be honest enough to publish her expenditure dashboard on that panel of enquiry. Not to do so, is to, for the umpteenth time, take the people of Abia State for granted.
Sir Don Ubani is a former Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Abia State, and Publisher of Equity Global Reporters Ltd.
