US Billionaire, Robert Smith, To Fund Education Of 21 Chibok Girls |

A black American billionaire, Mr Robert Smith, has offered to sponsor the education of the 21 Chibok girls recently released by the Boko Haram sect.

This was disclosed yesterday by the senior special assistant to the president on media and publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu.

Speaking on the welfare of the recently released 21 Chibok girls, Malam Shehu said the girls are being treated as adopted children of the federal government but revealed that there is a lot of local and international interest in the future of the girls.

“A black American billionaire, Mr Robert Smith, who is currently sponsoring the education of 24 girls from Chibok, among them the first set of escapees from Boko Haram at the American University of Nigeria, Yola, has offered to pay for the education of the 21 released girls through negotiations and is offering to take responsibility for all the others who will hopefully be eventually set free.

“The Murtala Mohammed Foundation in the country is equally interested,” said the presidential spokesman.

Responding to complaints by some of the parents of the 21 Chibok girls that they did not have enough room for interaction with their daughters brought home for Christmas by the Department of State Services (DSS),  the presidential aide admitted that there were some hitches arising from a lack of understanding of the objective of the trip on the part of some security operatives but noted that following the receipt of this complaint, a directive was given from the headquarters for parents to have access to their children.

Meanwhile, Borno State governor, Kashim Shettima, yesterday called for a detailed investigation of what happened to the N500 million said to have been released for the reconstruction of Government Girls’ Secondary School, Chibok.

LEADERSHIP recalls that the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan had announced the release of the money after the abduction of the Chibok school girls.

Former minister of finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, had flown to Chibok to inaugurate the N500 million rebuilding project under the Safe School Initiative.

Two years on, the project is yet to be completed while students of the school remain at home.

Shettima told residents of Chibok that his administration would pressurise the federal government to expose those who might have diverted the money.

The governor lamented that a lot of individuals and groups had turned the misfortunes of Boko Haram victims into a money making venture.

He said it was important to determine how much was released to the contractor handling the project as the school has remained in a state of disrepair.

50,000 Ghost Workers Sacked, Over N200bn Saved In 2016

In another development, Shehu disclosed that the federal government payroll has been rid of 50,000 ghost workers, saving the country a whopping N200 billion.

By this, N13 billion has been taken off the payroll monthly from February to December this year.

Speaking with State House correspondents at an interactive meeting to mark the end of the year, Mallam Garba Shehu, announced that 11 persons behind the syndicate of ghost workers had been handed over to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

“The flagship programme of the Muhammadu Buhari administration to rid the system of fraud and instill good governance is on course. Through a notable initiative of the Efficiency Unit of the Federal Ministry of Finance, the government has embarked on the continuous auditing of the salaries and wages of government departments.

“When the committee was constituted in February 2016, the federal government’s monthly salary bill was N151 billion, excluding pensions. Now the monthly salary warrant is N138 billion, excluding pensions, which means that the government is making a monthly saving of about N13 billion. That is from February 2016 to date,” he said.

The presidential spokesman added that the “the pension bill was 15.5billion monthly as at February. Now it is down to N14.4 billion, which means the average monthly saving is about N1.1 billion.”

He explained that the total number of ghost workers so far removed from the payroll is about 50,000, and said that 11 persons running the syndicate of the ghost workers had been referred to EFCC with some of them already undergoing trial.

US Billionaire, Robert Smith, To Fund Education Of 21 Chibok Girls |