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Top Nigerian in bribery scandal
21/03/2005 11:18 - (SA)
Lagos - Nigeria's education minister has been charged with bribing other parliamentarians to help pass an overvalued 2005 budget for education, Nigerian press reported said on Sunday.
Nigeria's main anti-graft agency EFCC arrested Education Minister Fabian Osuji on Thursday and charged him with distributing bribes totalling 50m naira ($462 000) to members of an education committee within the national assembly.
Nigeria's Senate President Adolphus Wabara is implicated in the affair but issued a denial of any corruption on Sunday, though he accepted he had helped Osuji pass the budget, the statement read.
"Sometime in December 2004, a senator, who is a close friend of the minister of education, Fabian Osuji, reported to the president of the Senate that the minister was having serious problems with the chairpeople of the education committees of both the Senate and the House of Representatives concerning the budget of the ministry of education.
"The president of the Senate accepted to intervene so as to ensure quick passage of the 2005 budget.
"The president of the Senate thereafter called a meeting of the leadership of the Education committees (...) both parties discussed their differences over the budget in a very frank manner.
"At no point at the meeting was any form of monetary demands made from the minister; and at no point did the president of the Senate ask the minister to give money to anybody," the statement added.
Since his election in 1999 Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo has made efforts to increase the fight against endemic corruption in the nation of 130 million inhabitants.
Nigeria is Africa's greatest oil producer and the sixth largest in the world. However, the United Nations estimates that 80% of the population live on less than a dollar a day.
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