Lagos SPN Condemns the Spending of N80 Million on Lagos Lawmakers Wives’ Dubai ‘Training’ Trip

The recent revelation that the Speaker of the Lagos House of Assembly, Mudasiru Obasa spent N80 million on a Dubai ‘training’ trip for 20 wives of Lagos lawmakers is highly condemnable. This is just one amongst the many profligate public expenditures by the Lagos State House of Assembly.
Lagos State Chapter of the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) sees this so-called training trip as one of the numerous profligate spending and looting that goes on unchallenged under APC led Lagos state government. The Lagos SPN queries an expenditure on a training trip on unelected wives of the State lawmakers and of what benefit is the ‘trip and the so-called training will be for the poor masses of the state? Expending N80 million on a jamboree trip is brazen and insensitive to the growing hardship people face in Lagos due to mass unemployment and lack of basic infrastructure. In fact, it is this kind of expenditure in their many folds that are responsible for the growing poverty and hopelessness in the country.
The entire Lagos state government, including the executive arm, is a cesspool of corruption. It is on this basis that the Lagos SPN demands a democratically constituted public probe panel by elected representatives of the labour movement, pro-masses’ organizations, professional groups and community groups to investigate the allegations of sleaze and misappropriation against the leadership of the Lagos State House of Assembly and how public funds allocated to the Lagos State House of Assembly was spent since 1999. The mandate of the panel is to also investigate all projects and contracts since 1999. Anyone found guilty to be sentenced to imprisonment and their properties confiscated in lieu of the sums misappropriated.
A consequence of the legendary corruption of the capitalist elite in Lagos especially those of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) is that many Lagos schools are dilapidated with overcrowded classrooms, inadequate classroom teachers and lacking other basic facilities like libraries, sporting facilities etc., public hospitals have largely become a step to the mortuary while roads are in decrepit conditions, most youths are either unemployed or underemployed and yet the bourgeois ruling elite are blinded by this reality. These reckless lawmakers and other political office holders in the country are earning jumbo salaries, allowances and office perks put at over N1.2 trillion as a form of legalized looting.
Another drainpipe with which public funds are looted is the CONTRACT SYSTEM that allows political office holders in collaboration with their private sector friends to steal public funds through inflated projects’ cost under the disguise of a public-private partnership (PPP). We demand an end to contract system and to be replaced with public works department democratically managed and adequately funded.
Ultimately, all these show the need to show the ruling party the door. For two decades, they have failed miserably. The Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) is ready to offer the required lead in build a movement to unseat the APC and replace them with workers and poor peoples’ government which armed with socialist policies will utilize the enormous wealth of the state to begin to fix broken public infrastructures, address age-long housing and transportation problems, create decent jobs and transform the lives of the mass majority.

Comrade Rufus Olusesan
State Chairman

Comrade M. K Shoyombo
State Publicity Secretary

Website: www.socialistpartyofnigeria.org.ng
E-mail: [email protected]