Wike Fires DG Of Rivers Bureau Of Public Procurement

Daniel Efe

Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers state has sacked Rivers state director-general of Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), Franklyn Nlerum.

The governor’s directive was conveyed in a terse government statement endorsed by Nkem Nwadibe, the special adviser to the governor on project costing and due process.

The statement said the Rivers state government has directed Franklyn  Nlerum to handover all government properties in his possession to the manager of finance of the BPP.

The statement further said the sack of Nlerum, (a Lawyer by profession) is with immediate effect and that the announcement of the name of the acting DG would be announced later.

In October last year, Nlerum had a disagreements with the members of the Rivers state branch of the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCN) who accused him of a failed attempt to divert the sum of N540 million from the bureau’s account to a private company called Metropole Development Company. An allegation Nlerum dismissed as baseless and an attempt to tarnish his image.

The crisis reached its peak when the angry workers barricaded the entrance to the office of the BPP and called on the state government to probe Nlerum’s handling of the bureau’s finances.

At the time of the standoff between the workers and the embattled DG, the state secretary of the ASCN, Bashman Mohammed, a lawyer, had said this in a press briefing at the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) Press Centre in Port Harcourt, the Rivers state capital, had threatened that the association would call its members out for full blown strike if the DG continued to victimize workers for querying his style of administration.

Other allegations by the association’s secretary was that the director general unlawfully seized staff salaries and that all attempts made by the association to resolve the issue had fallen on deaf ears, and accused Nlerum of running the agency in contravention of the extant legislations establishing the bureau and the public service rules.

Mohammed said: ”The director general has been running the BPP in contravention of the extant legislations establishing the bureau and public service rules.” 

Nlerum had denied all the allegations and said his hands were clean and was no afraid of inquest. It was not clear at press time if his sack was an outcome of the findings of the state Government on the previous allegations against the DG.

Culled from www.naij.com