Task force has ‘no access to donated fund’

From Bolaji Ogundele, Abuja

The Presidential Task Force on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic has said it has no control over the multi-billion naira contributions have have so far been announced by various donors towards the fight against the pandemic.

Chairman of the task force and Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Mr Boss Mustapha, gave clarifications on the operations of his special group said the only thing so far received by the task force was the materials donated by the founder of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma.

According to the SGF, there are four fronts through which government, organisations, individuals and bodies had rallied to pool resources together to fight to COVID-19 in Nigeria, adding that only one of these fronts is linked directly with his task force.

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Mustapha said there is the front being jointly coordinated by the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr Godwin Emefiele and Alhaji Aliko Dangote; there is the front being coordinated by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and other interests within the nation’s oil and gas sector; then the third one being coordinated by the United Nations (UN) family.

These three fronts, he said, had their independent governance structures for the management of the resources, both financial and materials, generated within their loops, adding that they all had the auditing mechanism over which the Nigerian government had no control.

The fourth one, however, which he said is that government’s arrangement, only created an account for the operations and actions that the task force had been supervising since it was created, adding that no fund had yet been released into the account, which he said was just created on Wednesday. He said this is the only front where government has its control.

”Let me inform the nation that so far the Presidential Task Force has not received any donation directly, in terms of cash for this exercise. We have received materials, particularly the one from Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire and that has adequately been distributed by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.”