Embattled suspended managing director of the Nigerian Ports Authority, Hadiza Bala Usman, has said that the allegations against her by a former board member of the NPA, Senator Binta Garba, are not only spurious, the latter has also exposed herself as someone who was on the board as an agent of destabilization.
Senator Garba had issued a statement on Sunday in which she alleged that the suspended NPA managing director influenced her removal from the agency after she demanded financial transparency.
Ms Garba, who represented Adamawa North at the Senate between 2015 and 2019, also accused Usman of working against the directives of President Muhammadu Buhari and Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi.
But Hadiza Usman on Monday in a statement said Senator Garba’s allegations of resistance to inquiries on the finances of the NPA are false, and that the Authority had since 2016 openly exhibited readiness to be held to public scrutiny.
Some of the ways the NPA did this, according to her, include: signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with BudgIT Open Budget System Platform and Implementation of a Public Data Dissemination programme; publishing the tariff regime of the authority on the website in line with the vision of transparency and accountability; conducting the statutory audit of the backlog of the authority’s financial statements for 2013-2016 and presenting same for approval and submission to the appropriate quarters.
Others are engaging international renowned auditing firms for the audit of the NPA’s financial statements up until 2019 with full compliance to all Nigerian laws and the International Financial Reporting Standards.
Ms Usman wondered: “When the auditors presented the financial statement to the finance committee of which she was a member, did she seek clarifications on areas that seemed opaque or suspicious?
“If she did, what happened? If she was not satisfied with the answers provided by the auditors, why did she not consider withholding assent to the statement? Why did she not formally document her discontent? Why did she not issue a minority opinion on the statement, instead of now speaking after the fact?”
She said while she concedes to Senator Garba’s right to whatever opinion she desires concerning the relationship between both of them when she was a board member, the senator should remember that “those who allow themselves to be used to malign innocent people have their own days of reckoning waiting for them.”
Ms Hadiza Usman had been suspended by President Muhammadu Buhari over alleged non-remittance of some of the agency’s funds to the Federal Government, an allegation she has denied.