Corruption: Petition against Fashola: No one is sponsoring us

Mr. Debo Adeniran is the chairman, Coalition Against Corrupt Leaders (CACOL). In this chat, he dismisses insinuations of being sponsored to smear the image of former governor of Lagos State, Mr Raji Babatunde Fashola.

Debo

What actually informed the petition is a small business we got from the Lagos State government in 2009. Since 2009, we have been communicating to the Lagos State government over the suspicion that contracts could have been inflated and a number of malfeasances could have been going on within the procurement and award of contracts in Lagos State.

We sent our petition to the Lagos State House of Assembly; we also sent a copy to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. The House of Assembly set up a panel to look at the complaint but the Lagos State government went to court to stop the investigation. They (Lagos State government) got an injuction to stop the House and the House wrote to us that they could not continue with the investigation.

The EFCC said they had invited some directors and principal officers to give their explanation but they (EFCC) did not give us any feed back on the interrogation they did. Since then, we have been reminding the EFCC. May this year, we paid them (EFCC) an advocacy visit but they did not have any cogent thing to tell us. We were not to be threatened nor intimidated.

When we got wind that Mr Fashola could be a member of the federal cabinet under President Muhammadu Buhari, we wrote to the president that Fashola has a lot of explaining to do regarding the contracts awarded when he was governor of Lagos State.

We decided to write to the president not to consider him and that he (Buhari) should ask the anti-graft agency to investigate the allegations leveled against him (Fashola) and prosecute him (Fashola) if found wanting.

Then talking about us being sponsored; if we are being sponsored by what we want to do, we would be glad to have such sponsors. We do not have sponsors, we are actually looking for sponsors so that we can dig deep into the affairs of Lagos State, to bring out more facts and figures that we can lay our hands on. The protest will not end until we are answered.

We do not have resources that is why we are limiting it. Nobody is sponsoring us. We want people who are interested in the better life for Lagos State to come out and sponsor us, but as long as they will not tie a string to the sponsorship. What we will not do is to blackmail people.

Vanguard