By Mike Adeyemi
The Rector of Kwara State Polytechnics, Ilorin, Dr. Abdul Jimoh Mohammed has described the allegations of corruption and financial misappropriation levelled against him as baseless and unfounded.
While fielding questions from this medium in his office, recently, he said the state Commissioner of Tertiary Education, Hajia Saadatu Kawu Modibbo was also accused of colluding with him to perpetrate that alleged act by faceless petitioners.
According to him, “The allegations against my personality and the Commissioner for Tertiary Education by faceless as seen on the social media is just a bundle of lies.
“I think the allegation is as a result of termination of contractual agreement between the Polytechnic and the company handling our portal. That is the major source of the allegations.
“We observed that it is as if we don’t have portal. Because a robust portal must have inputs by the Heads of Departments, examination officials, Directors of institutes, Rector, exams and records, which was not so, ” he explained.
He explained further, “But as it is, the Kwara Poly portal when Dalash was operating it, was just as good as a payment platform, and nothing more. I can’t call it a portal even with my little ICT knowledge.”
The Polytechnic boss, said that the erstwhile portal didn’t have ICT solution, hence the termination of contract with the handler.
“Even that payment platform as it was, there were lots of complaints. The council constituted a committee on portal issue, with their report there were many revelations.
“The portal manager told us that he signed contractual agreement with the polytechnic in 2018, but we discovered that he has been taken monies from the institution as far back as 2014/15.
“Even the MoU he signed is faulty. The MoU is not suppose to go beyond two years and the clause for termination is that you have to give two months notice.
“But in the case of Dalash, we noticed that he signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the institution for five years and that before we can terminate the contract we have to give him two years notice. Where is it done?” Mohammed queried.
“More so, we discovered that it was possible to edit the soft copy codes These were some of the discoveries. How can we allows things to go like this. When the petition came, I invited the portal man, Dalash who is not based in Nigeria. He is in abroad. He just has two agents working for him. He does not have an office in our polytechnics.
“I told him he must have an office here. He requested for laptop, we bought him the laptop with the hope he would operate on campus to no avail.
“When we told him of this soft code issue, the director asked him to change that dot org immediately. I learnt he just changed it about two months ago when he discovered that I am monitoring what is going on.
“There are lots of discoveries by the council committee. It is the council that terminated his contract, not the management. And the council has the power to do that,” the Rector stressed.
He, however, described his relationship with the state Commissioner for Tertiary Education as purely official.
“Before the Constitution of the council, I was interacting with the commissioner purely on official basis and seek ministry’s approvals to carry out our activities.
Recall that an online medium had earlier published report of allegation of financial corruption against the Commissioner for Tertiary Education and the Rector.
However, all efforts to get the ertswhile handler of the portal to get his reaction over the allegation proved abortive at the time of filing this report.
