The Kwara State Government appears set on a war path with the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP over a N23bn bond to be sourced from the stock market.

Finance Commissioner, Nurudeen Banu, had set the ball rolling when, at a press conference, he announced that the bond was part of an envisaged N250bn needed to develop the state.

Of the amount, he stated that the state had earlier taken N17bn and N10bn respectively as bonds.

The Commissioner and the Special Assistant on Investments to Governor Abdulfattah Ahmed, Yomi Ogunshola, stated at the press briefing that, out of the N23bn, N7.5bn would be used to offset outstanding loans secured from some commercial banks.

But the PDP, through its state chairman, Chief Iyiola Oyedepo, berated the government, calling on it to publicly disclose the actual debt profile of the state.

The party also demanded to know what had been done with the loans previously taken by the state, before thinking of gunning for another bond.

Oyedepo said the PDP’s position on the proposed bond was that the state government should first reveal its debt profile.

He said that since 2009, all the bonds taken by the government were neither accounted for, nor were they seen to have been judiciously and prudently spent.

"Governor Ahmed should not take a loan of N23bn without accounting for all he has taken since 2011," Oyedepo stated.

He alleged that the state government had not accounted for the N17bn and N10bn bonds taken in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

According to him, all the projects the state government claimed it used the funds for had no direct effect on the well-being of the citizens.

He added that the agriculture modernisation the government said it has perfected was nothing but a ruse.

Oyedepo said the construction of State Secretariat, Phase II, Ilorin Water Reticulation, Aviation College, Cargo Terminal, Kwara State University, urban road projects, as well as settlement of outstanding debts, which the government claimed to have expended on had no direct bearing on the living standards of the people.

"No agriculture has been modernised in Kwara. The PDP’s position is that the Songa farm experiment is a total failure. The farm has not been able to pay the N650m the state guaranteed for it yet," he said.

According to the PDP chairman, the N650m was later deducted from the state's statutory allocation to offset the Songa loan.

"A farm that cannot pay back its loan is nothing but a failure. I challenge the government to prove that it is the proceeds from the Songa farm that paid the loan," Oyedepo stated.

He also averred that the Ilorin water reticulation project that had gulped about N5.2bn, out of the N7bn earmarked for it, was not justified.

This, Oyedepo said was because over 70% of Ilorin metropolitan at present cannot access good water not to talk of other communities in the neighbourhood.

Meanwhile, the government had said the N23b bond would be used among others on the Ilorin Water reticulation, completing cargo terminal, the university and others being the projects that had started from the days of the immediate past administration.