Posted by In response to a recent report urging President Bola Tinubu to look into the Nigeria Electrification Project, NEP, the coalition of West African Investigative Journalists, COWAFIJ, fired and distanced itself from a former member, Gboyega Adeoye.
At a news conference held in Lagos over the weekend, Gboyega—who claimed to be the Secretary-General of CWAFIJ—asked the president to launch an investigation into how the Nigeria Electrification Project, or NEP, spent more than $550 million (N426 billion) of a reimbursable grant.
He said that the loan was secured by NEP, a division of the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), from the World Bank and the African Development Bank while it was being managed by the REA’s current managing director.
However, in a Tuesday interview with reporters in Lagos, the president of CWAFIJ, Femi Adebayo, denounced what he called a “crackdown” on government officials in the nation by certain suspended CWAFIJ members who want the president to fire officials solely for their own personal gain.
He claimed that the group described such claims as extortion intended to extort money from various federal government departments and public officials in the nation during an Emergency Extraordinary Congress on Monday.
As part of the issues brought up and discussed at the Extraordinary Emergency Congress of our organization, we not only disassociate ourselves from these impostors, particularly one Gboyega Adeoye, a former COWAFIJ member who is posing as the Secretary-General of CWAFIJ, but we are also confident that their plans and those of other groups or people who may want to tow this line will fail.
“President Bola Tinubu is an impartial and astute leader who cannot allow hoodlums and greedy people to tell him who to hire and fire, especially when their only goal is to blackmail and extort public officials for personal gain,” he stated.