Ndubuisi Ugah 
The former Chairman of the Pension Reform Task Team (PRTT), Abdulrasheed Maina, yesterday said he needed about six weeks to recover before he could attend trial in court. Maina, who was speaking from his hospital bed in a video, which surfaced on Thursday, said he was not trying to evade trial, according to an online news portal, TheCable. Saturday Telegraph gathered that Maina’s clarification emerged on a day when reports were rife that the former pension chief has been absent from trial since he was released after meeting his bail conditions.
To confirm this, the senator representing Borno South, Senator Ali Ndume, who is standing as a surety for Maina, had on October 3, told the Federal High Court in Abuja, that he did not know the whereabouts of the former pension boss. However, Maina’s counsel, Mr. Francis Oronsaye, told the court that his client was at Maitama General Hospital receiving treatment.
Speaking from a hospital bed, Maina said he was not trying to evade trial, but only trying to “get better”. He said: “What the doctors told me is that I’ll need at least six to seven weeks of recovery because it is a knee cap injury.”
Maina also said he suffered a constant rise in blood pressure which affects his head and makes him drowsy. On the issue of asset recovery, Maina said he saw a report, which stated that he would recover N10 billion, but he denied saying so.
He said: “I never told anyone to go and say so. But it is something I can do. I did that during the Jonathan administration and we recovered N1.6 trillion as a committee and dur-ing this administration, I recovered N1.3 trillion. “I can also do that for President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. Imagine an administration that owes me N65 billion, which is five per cent of my recovery of N1.3 trillion, now putting me up for trial over N2 billion. Do they think Nigerians are stupid?”
