The Coalition of Arewa Civil Society Groups (CASCGs) has called on the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Crimes and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to investigate accounts of the Nigeria Leather and Science Technology (NILEST) Zaria under the leadership of Professor Mohammed Kabir Yakubu.
Addressing a press conference in Kaduna yesterday, the spokesman of the group, Comrade Abbas Aminu, said over time, authorities in Nigeria had alluded to the fact that the leather industry remained the second major viable foreign exchange earner after oil, which is also in tandem with the report of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG).
The group recalled that the 2019 macro-economic outlook report placed the contributions of domestic leather production at 24 percent of the total agriculture GDP in Nigeria.
“However, despite all these indices of high possibility of economic diversification through the full utilisation of the leather industry, the only institute saddled with the responsibility of transforming this trajectory into absolute reality has not been achieved.
“We want to emphatically state that the Nigerian Institute of Leather and Science Technology (NILEST) under the stewardship of the director general, Prof. Mohammed K. Yakubu has failed in all ramifications, rather than thinking out of the box towards harnessing leather as a product for national development, he chose using tax payers’ money to attend jamborees across the globe and nation and making purely insincere statements and instituting centres without manpower and Infrastructure in the name of boosting the capsising old leather industry.
“We challenge him to present the number of hides and skin the institution has been able to produced or products for the hides and skin since his assumption into office as the helmsman of leather research institute.
“We also want to ask him to provide or make public the contract files for the development of effluent treatment for Daura in Katsina State from 2016-2022. Hence, we call on the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Crimes and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to investigate the accounts of the institute.”
