N4bn Anchor Borrowers’ loan: APC chieftain urges Tinubu to probe Niger Govt

Former Niger State Commissioner for Information, Culture, and Tourism and a chieftain of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Jonathan Tsado Vatsa, has called on President Bola Tinubu to launch an investigation into the alleged mismanagement of the N500 billion Anchor Borrowers loan of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) given to the state.

Vatsa stated this on a live radio programme on Tuesday, monitored by newsmen in Minna, the capital of Niger State.

President Tinubu recently lamented over how billions of naira were disbursed under the scheme, out of which the Niger State government received N4 billion.

Vatsa said on air: “If Mr President goes ahead to probe the disbursement of the Anchor Borrowers fund in Niger State, we will be interested to know those farmers that benefited from this Anchor Borrowers fund in Niger State.

“Are they the same farmers that were chased away from their farms and their ancestral homes by bandits, or the farmers in Government House and supervising ministries?”

The former publicity secretary of APC in Niger continued: “We saw how the sharing formula of the state N4 billion Anchor Borrowers fund led to a serious fight in the state among the “air-conditioned farmers,” while the real farmers who were the targeted beneficiaries used hoes, cutlasses, and in some cases, bare hands, to weed their farms in communities where there are no bandits activities.”

He insisted that the scheme was well intended but was hijacked by some state governments, including Niger State, where the fund was openly diverted by those that mattered in the government to the detriment of poor farmers in the country.

Vatsa warned that it would be a disservice to the country should the President decide to politicise his probe of the scheme by limiting it to states controlled by opposition parties.