Road Contract: Kwara Speaker Accuses Ex Governor Ahmed Of Sharp Practices

By Steve Oni, Ilorin

The Speaker, Kwara state House of Assembly, Rt Hon Yakubu Danladi, has disclosed that the former governor of the state, Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed, allegedly turned the 33 kilometre Ilesha/Gwanara road contract in Kaiama and Baruten local government area of the state to a conduit pipe to siphon the resources of the state.

Danladi made the allegation while speaking with Journalists during the one year celebration of the 9th Assembly of the Kwara state House of Assembly.

He said: “The former hasinistration in the state awarded the surface dressing of the 33 kilometer Ilesha/Gwanara road to a contractor and nothing was done on it. This is a popular road where this Otoge started. The youth in the area blocked our former House of Representatives member, the video went viral.

“It is a 33 kilometer road which the former governor, Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed, used as a conduit pipe to siphon Kwara resources because N1.8 billion had been paid to the contractor with nothing done on the road.”

Danladi, who said that the people in the area had never seen an asphalt road before, stated that Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq has now awarded the road with asphalt tarring at lower cost and would be completed before the end of this year.

“There are some of our villagers who have never seen asphalt since the beginning of the earth, Abdulrazaq is the first governor to construct Asphalt road in Gwanara. The contractor has been mobilized to the site and by December, the project would be completed”, he said.

However, Chief Press Secretary to former Governor Ahmed, Alhaji Abdulwahab Oba said that the contract for Ilesha Gwanara road was awarded by the administration and the contractor was paid in relation to the work done adding, “we paid according to specification of the job as approved by the state Ministry of Works.

“What the Speaker has said is political, to please his people. We have done the needful when we were In government. The present administration should do the needful by serving the people. It should face the future and do the needful because four years is close”, Oba advised.

Speaking on the achievements of the Assembly, Danladi said that the Assembly passed 22 bills and motions which had direct impact on the people.

Such bills, the Speaker said, included the Social Investment Bill, the Child Rights Law, Owo Arugbo and the Sports investment bill.

He stated that each of the 24 members in the Assembly had spent their personal allowances to provide comfort for the people in their respective constituency, adding that the state government had sunk 14 motorized boreholes in Baruten local government while electricity had been restored and extended to some villages where it had been off in the past years.