The Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar, in an interview with Vanguard, has finally reacted to the Abuja house which was reported to have been bought for him by the Sokoto State Government.
In his reaction, he accuses the media of painting issues in a bad light without finding out the facts, also accusing social media users of doing same.
The Sultan, however, agreed that there indeed is a house but it is not for him – for the Sultanate Council.
“I think there is somebody somewhere who just wanted to spite me and the governor of Sokoto State; otherwise, I see no reason for the report that Sokoto State government bought a house in Abuja for the Sultan who already owned a house there. It (report) is highly despicable. I wonder what kind of journalism some of our journalists practice these days. Journalists just jump into issues they do not know how they (stories) began and where they will end, and write reports and their publishers publish same. That is also part of the problem with the social media”, the Sultan started.
“What actually happened was that the Sokoto State government decided to get a house in Abuja for the Sultanate Council and not for Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III; the house is to be used by anybody who becomes the Sultan of Sokoto. That is the truth of the story. And they sat down at their State Executive Council meeting, discussed and got it approved. It was legally done therefore. All the transactions concerning the Abuja house they wanted to buy were done by government. When they consulted me and said they would get the house and furnishing for over a billion naira, I told them no, ‘why should they buy a house of over a billion?’ I said that when they hand over the house to the Sultanate Council, I will move all the furniture that I use in the house that I live in currently, which is on lease, into the official residence.
“And because of that input from me, which implied that there was no need for government to furnish the house, the cost reduced from over N1 billion to about N650 million. That should be appreciated by anybody who is public spirited. But because payment was made from government account to somebody’s account, who is one of the sons of the soil doing his own business as a private person and has his right to do business, and he has been doing contracts for government and is not a government official, somebody in the EFCC flashed it and he was right to have done that. But, when they saw the whole thing, they discovered that there was nothing wrong with the transaction. But somebody in the EFCC still had to give that as a story to an online newspaper and see what they wrote about me, saying I have a house in Abuja and I still collected money from government to buy a house in the same Abuja. So funny.
“But I am always happy whenever I remember that people who do this against me are only helping me as Allah will make sure that my sins will be removed and placed upon them. What Allah does to people who commit this kind of hypocrisy against another is that, He will take their good deeds away and replace them with the sins of the person they have wronged. That is my consolation. And that is why I refused to speak on the matter and I will never speak on it because it does not make sense to me. The truth is open and nobody is in doubt of the clarity. No financial wrong was committed and the Sokoto State government has come out with the facts and that is final. And do you know that even up till now, the state government has not handed over to the Sultanate Council the Abuja house, which will be furnished with my own money? They are the ones doing the buying of the house. But they will definitely hand it over and when it is handed over, we will work on it to ensure that it meets the standard of the Sultanate so that we can hold our meetings and receive our visitors there without having to go out again and rent halls to do our official events in Abuja”.
