Kano State Governor Abdullahi Ganduje has said the foreign scholarship scheme undertaken by the administration of Senator Rabi’u Kwankwaso was fraudulent.
Ganduje spoke at a media parley to mark his third anniversary.
He said his administration would continue to scrutinise the scheme to ensure probity and transparency.
The governor regretted that the last administration sent thousands of students abroad without proper arrangement.
He said: “There was a pronouncement by the last administration that the tuition was fully paid so incoming governments will have nothing to worry about. But when we came in, we discovered this was a lie.
“We also discovered that our students were paying higher than their colleagues in other institutions. There was so much corruption that some money meant for tuition was captured at the Cairo airport by the Interpol (the case is still being investigated).”
The governor noted that some universities where students were sent do not offer the courses applied for while some of them were of lower standard compared with the standard of universities in Nigeria.
“Over N4 billion has been expended on foreign scholarship. If that money was used to develop the state-owned Yusuf Maitama Sule University, the permanent site would have been completed long ago. The faculty building was abandoned when we assumed office and we had to pay N400 million to bring back the contractors to site.
“My administration decided to continue with the projects and programmes of the last administration because it is a government of continuity and fine-tuning.”