The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, has said he inherited a debt of N7.5 billion from his predecessor, Mai Bala Buni when he assumed office in March of 2022.
Adamu, who disclosed this during a media parley on Thursday at the party’s national secretariat in Abuja, also said he discovered a series of sharp practices within the party’s staff, ghost workers, and unpaid salaries.
His revelations came while providing an answer to a question of why he sacked its former directors and replaced them with his kinsmen.
The APC chairman however refuted the claims and said “the fact of the matter is, go through the secretariat, there is not one person since we came in here that is my blood relation. Not one, whether primary or part of my extended family.
“It is a fallacy (that I have my people working here). In fact, when we came here, it was to reorganize and reconstitute the party. You don’t see the party in a state of mess and look the other way just because you want to be decent and not offend anybody.
“We came and found the party where people are fixing all manners of things. We had a bill of N7.5bn to settle on legal matters alone. We came to find that here everybody was like me, on his own. No control, no system, and no due process. Everybody was doing what he wanted to do. It is just because you don’t want to be accused of anything that you will allow those kinds of people.
“My DNA has a terrible allergy to that. I am sure most, if not all, of my members in the NWC share in this. So we found the necessity to reorganize the center and only God knows the extent of appreciation we probably have won. Of course, every situation of change has a victim of its own, and ours is not an exception. And we didn’t do anything with bias or prejudice. The main thing is the interest of the party.
“I know we will be abused and falsely accused but we are humans. I am not saying we don’t make mistakes. But the fact of the matter is that there is nothing we have done deliberately just to promote our own interests. We don’t do it. There is a lot of falsehood going on.”
Speaking on ghost workers in the APC headquarters, Adamu noted that “recently, we tried to introduce table payment. If you are a member of this chapel, you know we don’t have 200 people working for us here. But if you go through the payroll, we are over 200 people. Who are they? How did they come up with the bill? What are they doing for us? Where are their letters of appointment? What condition of service do they have?
“You don’t, because you are afraid of negative media reviews, ignore this. People went to the market square saying we are arranging salaries but can’t pay. That is very far from the truth. We met and paid some arrears when we came in. I don’t have any qualms about this. We did everything in good faith,” he said.