Lateef Olayinka
A former Director-General of the Nigeria Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, Dakuku Peterside, and a former Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress in Rivers State, Chris Finebone, have dismissed the account of stewardship rendered by Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, on Monday as incomplete and misleading. Both Peterside and Finebone, who were responding to the account of stewardship contained in a 536-page book launched by Wike, said the account did not include the total income the Rivers State Government had earned over the past six years that Wike had been governor. Finebone said the governor gave a one-sided account of his stewardship. “There is what is called value for money. There can be no honest accountability presentation or stewardship that would dwell on one side of the ledger. “You have to present proper stewardship by reading from both sides of the ledger; that is from the income side, which means accrued revenue to the state through federal allocations and IGR side by side your expenditure represented by projects and other outflows. This is what would determine whether the people are having value for money or being scammed as in this case.” On his part, Peterside said that contrary to the claim of the governor that Rivers State was not indebted to any bank, there was clear evidence that the state was not only owing but was the second most indebted state in the country. “Rivers State is the second most indebted state in the country. There is a Debt Management Office. You can verify this. At the time the last governor left office, Rivers State was owing in the neighbourhood of N15 to 25 billion maximum. Today, Rivers State is owing in excess of N200 billion. I am not talking of domestic debt tied to contracts.“So it is also wrong to say Rivers State is not borrowing the same way the federal government is borrowing. The challenge is not that you shouldn’t borrow. What are you borrowing for? How are you spending the money you are borrowing? We have not been able to create an economy for Rivers State. Our economy is not thriving.” Peterside, who lost to Wike in the 2015 governorship election, also faulted Wike’s claim that he had transformed the infrastructure in the state by building flyovers.“There are two sides to it: income, expenditure and value derivable or outcome. And we have done a primary analysis of the revenue of the government; the expenditure pattern and value derivable or outcome for Rivers people. And it shows it’s on the negative, that Rivers people have not got maximum value from the much money that government has earned.”
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