Zamfara State Governor, Dauda Lawal, has urged his predecessor and current Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle, to step aside and address the allegations of sponsoring banditry and money laundering during his tenure as governor.
Lawal made this call during an interview on TVC on Wednesday, stressing that Matawalle should clear his name if he still has any integrity.
“If I were him (Matawalle), I would resign and face all the allegations against me. Because from all the information we’re getting, my predecessor (Matawalle) was fully involved in some of this banditry issue,” Lawal said.
Lawal’s call follows accusations by wanted bandit kingpin Bello Turji that Matawalle of pampered a certain bandit group in the State during his governorship tenure.
Turji had claimed that Matawalle had hosted bandits at the Government House without demanding that they surrender their weapons.
According to Turji, “There is a particular group of bandits whom the former governor pampered. I chased the group from Shinkafi, I killed their leader, Dudu, for peace to reign in Shinkafi. The group had 200 arms, but the governor later hosted them at the Government House.”
Governor Lawal also accused Matawalle of leaving Zamfara State’s treasury empty, revealing that there was no more than N4 million left in the State’s account when he assumed office.
Lawal further alleged that over N250 billion was unaccounted for during Matawalle’s administration.
“EFCC made a pronouncement sometime around May 21, 2023, or there about that it was alleging that N70 billion was stolen. That was before I took over. By the time I took over, I realised that that N70 billion they mentioned was a child’s play,” he said in an earlier interview on Channels TV.
“So far based on available records, we realised over N250 billion was not accounted for. It is very funny. Let me explain to you the state I inherited. I inherited a very dysfunctional state. When I took over there was no N4 million in Zamfara State Government account – just empty.”
The Governor also disclosed that his administration had to settle over N1.3 billion for students who could not sit for their West African Examinations Council, WAEC, and National Examinations Council, NECO, exams under Matawalle’s administration.
“There was a backlog of salaries for four months. For three years. none of Zamfara’s indigenes wrote either WAEC or NECO. I had to settle N1.3 billion for NECO and N1.6 billion for WAEC. Some of the students got their certificates after we settled WAEC and NECO,” Lawal explained.
Matawalle has yet to respond to Lawal’s remarks, but he, through his media consultants, has denied the allegations of bandit sponsorship by Turji.
He described the claims as baseless and politically motivated attempts to discredit him. These are “baseless, malicious, unfounded, mischievous and deliberate concocted lies were told against the Honourable Minister of State for Defence, H.E. Dr Bello Muhammed Matawalle,” the statement from his office read.
The statement added that while Matawalle was governor between 2019 and 2023, he dealt decisively with banditry and criminal activities.
“It is noteworthy that the efforts of the honourable minister of state, while as Governor of Zamfara State between 2019 and 2023, saw banditry and all other sundry of criminality tackled head-on,” the statement read.
It also noted that all arms recovered from bandits were submitted to the appropriate security agencies.
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