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 Family and neighbors mourn woman shot by ICE agent after making Minneapolis her home  Before she was fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, 37-year-old Renee Good had just dropped her youngest child off at an elementary school in Minneapolis, the city she and her family had recently begun to call home. As Trump administration officials continued Thursday to describe Good as a domestic terrorist who tried to ram federal agents with her Honda Pilot, those who knew her remembered someone very different: a gentle, kind, and openhearted mother, wife, and neighbor. Good, her wife and her 6-year-old son had recently moved from Kansas City, Missouri, to a quiet Minneapolis neighborhood lined with older homes and small apartment buildings. Some front porches were still decorated with pride flags and lingering holiday lights. In the days following her death, neighbors grew weary of media attention. One handwritten sign taped to a front door read, “NO MEDIA ...

ALLEGED N5.78B FRAUD: AHMED,EX-KWARA GOVERNOR DIVERTED UBEC FUNDS- WITNESS.(PHOTO).#PRESS RELEASE


 Alleged N5.78b Fraud: Ahmed, Ex-Kwara Governor Diverted UBEC Funds-Witness


The First Prosecution Witness (PW1), Abubakar Hassan in the trial of former governor of Kwara State, Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed, and his Commissioner for Finance, Ademola Banu on Monday, February 17, 2025, told Justice Mahmud Abdulgafar of the State High Court, sitting in Ilorin that the first defendant diverted to personal use, funds earmarked for Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) projects in the state.


 The Ilorin Zonal Directorate of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC is prosecuting both defendants on a 12-count charge of mismanagement and misappropriation of public funds to the tune of N5.78 billion.


The witness, an Assistant Director of Finance in UBEC, while being led in evidence by prosecution, Rotimi Jacobs, SAN, disclosed that a total of 51 UBEC 

projects approved under the 2013 Action Plan were abandoned under former Governor Ahmed due to a lack of funds. The projects, discovered by the UBEC Project Monitoring Committee in the state were abandoned despite

 UBEC’s approval for citing them in state and funds for their execution, released. According to the witness, the state government under the leadership of the defendant mismanaged the funds.


"My lord, the Projects Monitoring 

Committee conducted investigations and found that many projects were either unexecuted or abandoned. We wrote to the then Kwara State governor, Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed, in May 2018 to address these issues. The projects were categorized into three: Early Care Education, Primary School Education, and Junior Secondary School Education, but we received no response," he said.

He further explained that the abandoned projects were scattered all through the 16 Local Government Areas of the state and further revealed that on January 6, 2015, the sum N1 billion had to be loaned from the 2013 UBEC Matching Grant Account with Skye Bank Plc to pay staff salaries and pensions.


Addressing the utilization of the 2014 and 2015 State Counterpart Funds, he stated that the Kwara SUBEB illegally withdrew the sum of N1,829,054,054.06 

(None Billion, Eight Hundred and Twenty-nine Million, Fifty-four Thousand, Fifty-four, Six Kobo) from funds lodged on February 18, 2016, stating that the withdrawn funds qualified the state to access the Federal Government’s UBE Matching Grants.


"State Matching Grants are not permitted to be borrowed or utilized for any purpose outside the approved action plan. The objectives of UBEC were undermined due to these infractions and the failure to implement the Action Plan," he said.

Worried by the diversion of the funds, the witness disclosed that UBEC also had

 to send a letter of invitation to the state government, 

requesting a documentary evidence 

on Kwara State Government’s use of UBEC funds. Attached to the invite were 

documents showing the lodgment of funds from UBEC to the Kwara SUBEB.

Justice Abdulgafar adjourned the matter until February 18, 2025, for cross-examination of the witness.

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