Governor Alex Otti of Abia State, has vowed to recover all government funds and property in the hands of alleged corrupt persons in the State.
He added that his administration would disconnect the mouths of more looters of public funds and property from the ‘feeding bottle’ of the State.
The governor who made the vow on Sunday in Umuahia at a thanksgiving service of the Deputy Speaker of Abia State House of Assembly, Austin Okezie Meregini, explained that various changes he had made so far in the State’s civil service and the dissolution of various Boards in the State were geared towards rebuilding Abia.
The stolen public funds and property, he said, would be recovered through the recently inaugurated Panel of Inquiry.
“It is also not uncommon for you to be hearing people wailing and crying; that is expected because for the past 24 years, some people had put their mouths on the feeding bottle and since we came we removed their mouths.
“There may be a few people whose mouths we have not seen and that is why we have the Panel. We will fish out those people and remove their mouths from the feeding bottle,” he said
Admonishing that public funds and property should be used for the good of the people, not cornered by a corrupt few, Otti added that: “The feeding bottle is for all of us. So anytime that happens, you will hear them screaming, ‘the man is undemocratic, the man wants to spoil the State’. We have not come to spoil, we have come to rebuild.
“So, if the rebuilding tastes like spoiling to them, we can’t understand but we cannot sympathize with them,” Otti said.
