The Ebonyi State House of Assembly has been urged to commence the impeachment process of Governor Francis Ogbonna Nwifuru over N551m Hajj approval for just 46 Muslims in the state. Association of Ebonyi Indigenes Socio-Cultural in the Diaspora (AEISCID) warned Governor Nwifuru to backtrack from spending N551M of tax-payers money on Islamic pilgrimage. Governor Francis Ogbonna Nwifuru has received massive backlash over this.
Paschal Oluchukwu described the decision to spend N551 million on Hajj despite severe economic hardships faced by the common citizens as reckless. The group called on Governor Nwifuru to reverse the decision and apologize to the poor masses.
He argued that there was no such financial provision for Hajj spending in the 2025 budget. AEISCID said the governor’s action is an abuse of public office and a gross violation of Section 120 (subsections 3 and 4) of the 1999 constitution.
“The laws of the land are clear in subsection 3 that; ‘No moneys shall be withdrawn from any public fund of the State, other than the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the State unless the issue of those moneys has been authorized by a law of the House of Assembly of the State. Subsection 4 also aptly reiterates; “No moneys shall be withdrawn from the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the State or any other public fund of the State except in the manner prescribed by the House of Assembly.
“As the poorest ranked State in Southern Nigeria, Ebonyi government should ordinarily channel all its efforts and energies towards ridding the impoverished Salt of the nation of its economic woes and poverty. It sounds astonishingly strange that the same Exco on the same day approved only but a paltry sum of N300M for the purposes of ’empowering’ some 300 Ebony people in the first item in its resolutions which it termed: ‘HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT.
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