The Senate Committee on Power has accused the Ministry of power, Works and Housing of duplicating some items in the 2018 budget appropriated to the ministry.
The Senate, during the interactive session with the Minister of State, Mr. Mustapha Baba Shahuru and the Permanent Secretary, Mr. Frank Edozie, the senate committee claimed that it observed that N120 million, N480 million and N288 million were appropriated separately budgeted for the purchase of utility vehicles, while were budgeted for treatment of office files and documents.
“Year in year out, the ministry presents the same items in the budget and asks for more funds to execute the same projects,” the Senator Eyinnaya Abaribe-led committee stated.
According to a member of the committee, Senator Clifford Ordia representing Edo Central, the duplication captured on three different pages of the budget.
Ordia said: “I need to understand this thing. Look at the different pages, you earmarked N120 million, N288 million and N480 million for the purchase of vehicles. Are these vehicles different? If you add up these figures, they will give you about N888 million.
“You also said that you want to spend N100 million on transfer of office files. How do you intend to do that? The people in your office, what have they been doing? I can also see from your estimates here that you captured another item for ICT, different from the N100 million for transfer of files. You need to explain these things,” he added.
Making his comment, Senator Hassan Mohammed from Yobe said the lawmakers could no longer cope with the issue of addressing the same items any more, saying that there is need for the ministry to always put things in order so that the ministry would move forward.
Lamenting on the poor performance of the ministry, Abaribe made the disclosure that the 2017 budget (capital) of the ministry only recorded 18 per cent performance.
“We will take it that the 2017 budget was abysmally low at only 18 per cent performance. This is unacceptable and I need to put it on record,” he said.
