A firm of management consultants, the Afri-Projects Consortium, has condemned what it described as a smear campaign by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to discredit the achievements of the Petroleum (Special) Trust Fund (PTF).
The firm, a PTF consultant for four years, said a statement credited to the Director of Media and Publicity of the PDP Presidential Campaign Organisation, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, contained “irresponsible slander” against the firm and its director, the late Salihijo Ahmad.
Fani-Kayode was quoted as saying that the late Ahmad was “the witness that could have nailed Buhari about the graft that took place at PTF…but died under mysterious circumstances.”
The firm, in a statement by its partners, Alhaji Nuruddeen Rafindadi, Alhaji Murtala Aliyu, Mr. A. Dahiru and Amina Mohammed, said after painstaking investigations, Afri-Projects and its workers were never found to have behaved in an unprofessional manner in its dealings with the defunct PTF.
It said contrary to Fani-Kayode’s claim, Ahmad died in Abuja on July 5, 1999 of complications from a long-standing heart ailment.
The firm said members of PTF’s Board of Trustees were “persons of towering character and esteem”, including the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, the late Mallam Yahaya Gusau, the late Alhaji Ahmed Talib, the late Chief Rufus Giwa, Prof. J. P. Clark, the late Prof. Chimere Ikoku, the late Chief D. B. Zang and the late Chief Tayo Akpata.
It noted that after President Olusegun Obasanjo scrapped PTF in June 1999, he set up an Interim Management Committee (IMC), headed by Dr. Haroun Adamu, to wind it up.
“The IMC went into a frenzy of investigation of the PTF operations and submitted a report in early 2000. That Haroun Adamu’s report, which is now being referred to, was a report lacking in credibility and undertaken with the pre-conceived notion of uncovering imaginary ‘sleaze’ by any means.
“For instance, the committee report accused our firm of over-invoicing our professional fees, and recommended a refund, whereas we had charged an amount less than 1.5 per cent of the total value of PTF projects and programmes under our management, which is a very low charge by any professional fee standard.
“In March 2000, President Obasanjo in disgust disbanded the Haroun Adamu-led committee for incompetence among other reasons.
“Several hundreds of millions of Naira of public funds stolen from the PTF were actually recovered from some members of that committee. Indeed, there were indictments, court trials and convictions of the affected Haroun Adamu’s committee members,” the firm said.
According to Afri-Projects, two other committees were set up to continue the investigation of the defunct PTF, and a final report was submitted by a former Police Affairs Minister Malam Adamu Waziri.
“Not only were all our responses affirmed, but the government team also accepted the validity of our outstanding fees. Part of these fees was approved and subsequently paid.
“The PTF certainly underwent some of the most rigorous investigations carried out on any agency, particularly with a fixed mindset to uncover ‘sleaze’ that was not there,” the firm said.
It added that none of its workers was ever indicted for wrongdoing.
“We wish to state that our firm, Afri-Projects Consortium, related with the defunct PTF in a professional and principled manner. We provided consultancy services spanning four years, involving over 350 highly skilled professional and support staff, at offices and sites located all over the country.
“We discharged our services to PTF conscientiously giving our best and after its scrapping stayed around and engaged to give account of our services and we did so creditably and satisfactorily.
“That was what our sense of duty dictated to us; it is what the late Salihijo Ahmad would have wished us to do,” the firm added.
