Kwara Govt Denies N800m Ranch Project Despite Evidence

By Zainab Sanni

The Kwara State Government has said that it did not spend N800m on a ranch project, stating that such a project does not exist. This was contained in a press statement issued on Wednesday, February 12, by the Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Oloruntoyosi Thomas. 

This is in response to an AfriCAST investigation published on Monday, February 10, on the state government spending 800 million naira on a non-existent ranch project. AfriCAST had revealed that the AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq-led administration budgeted a total of over 6 billion naira in  the 2022 and 2023 budget for the establishment of a ranch in Malete town, Moro Local government area of Kwara State to boost the agricultural sector in the state. AfriCAST’s review of the budget performance document prepared by the state government for 2023-2024 confirms that the sum of N860,005,731 was released for the project, indicating that the ranch project had commenced. However, our investigations revealed that there is no ranching project in Malete town.

Despite existing evidence to the contrary, the government insists it has not spent any money on the proposed Malete ranch between 2022 and 2023, as noted in the AfriCAST investigation. In her rebuttal to the claimed amount in the investigation, Thomas stated that the only related expenditure in the said years was N29,000,000 spent in 2022 for essential services such as topographic survey, environmental impacts assessment, and drone flights across the Malete site for the Kwara Special Agro Industrial Processing Zone project dated February 28, 2022.

She also said that the other closest volume of government’s expenditure in that category was the payment on October 9, 2023 of N779,506,155.08, another counterpart funds for the Special Agroprocessing Zone (SAPZ).

Thomas added that: “SAPZ is an ongoing five-year project funded by the African Development Bank, AfDB, and Islamic Development Bank. At the moment under SAPZ, there are four Agricultural Transformation Centres (ATCs) in Baruten (Okuta), Kaiama (Kaiama), Ifelodun (Olodan), and Asa (Afon). All the ATCs serve as production and aggregation centres, while Malete is the industrial hub.”

“The description in the budget for this expenditure is ‘Federal Government Contributions for Livestock Development (State Govt).’ These livestock programmes included L-PRES and SAPZ, a component of which ranching/grazing reserve is. This is normal in the national charts of accounts format. It is disturbing that the media refused to mention SAPZ (the real basis for the closest expenditure) in its report, even when not a dime was actually spent on ranch.”

“This clarification is for innocent members of the public who may have been misled by the mischievous publication. The intention of such publications is neither to inform nor encourage healthy debates around public expenditure, but to give negative portrayals of anything Nigerian and its government,” Thomas concluded

Recall that in our report, AfriCAST reached out to Thomas but she was not available for comments. Neither text nor WhatsApp messages sent to her were answered at press time. Also, the press secretary to Kwara State Governor, Rafiu Ajakaye, neither answered calls nor responded to SMS sent to him. All subsequent reminders sent to both the commissioner of Agriculture and Press Secretary to the governor were not responded to until the report was published.