 |
| Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, Minister of Budget and National Planning |
President Muhammadu
Buhari has ordered an immediate investigation into allegations of fraudulent
padding of allocations in the 2016 budget, with strict orders that all cases of
discrepancies, errors and ambiguities be resolved promptly, a senior government
official disclosed Thursday.
Media
report continues:
The
National Assembly on Tuesday suspended deliberations on the document
indefinitely.
The
chairman, Senate Committee on Appropriation, Danjuma Goje, (APC-Gombe State),
and his House of Representatives counterpart, Abdulmumin Jibrin (APC-Kano),
said the suspension was necessary to enable the National Assembly carry out
“proper clean-up” of the budget.
Earlier,
a senior presidency official blamed “budget mafia” for the controversial
contents, in reference to civil servants responsible for preparing the budget.
Another
top administration official on Thursday disclosed further details on how the
government was responding to the embarrassing budget allocations.
He
pleaded anonymity, and said the government was avoiding publicly stating its
position on the matter for now to avoid playing into the hands of its critics.
The
official said both the Finance and Budget & National Planning ministries
were determined to effect the necessary corrections and turn in a clean copy of
the document for approval.
He
blamed most of the errors in the budget on “over-ambitious civil servants” in
the budget office who handled the preparation of the document prior to the
appointment of ministers by Mr. Buhari.
He
said by the time the ministers were eventually appointed, they had no
sufficient time to properly scrutinize the budget for errors, in view of the
tight deadline each of the ministries got before the final presentation to the
joint session of the National Assembly on December 22, 2015.
To
enable the budget to be cleaned up of all the controversial allocations, the
official said a high-powered panel had been constituted with a mandate to
investigate all observations and concerns by individuals, media and agencies,
particularly the National Assembly.
“The
presidency has ordered the immediate investigation of all the allegations and
issues, particularly on padding, raised by the National Assembly on various
ministries, departments and agencies of government,” he said.
“The
investigative panel is expected to critically look into the budget
item-by-item, incident-by-incident, with particular attention to the reactions
from the National Assembly, ministries, media, civil society groups or indeed
anybody that raised concerns regarding the padding of the budget.
“All
corrections would be made to ensure that the budget was passed as soon as
possible. I assure you government is working cautiously on the corrections with
the intention of correcting any error or malfeasance spotted in the 2016
Appropriation Bill. If there is any error whatsoever, it is being sorted out
straight away,” the official added.
It
remained unclear what sanctions the government was considering for officials
that might be found to be involved in padding the budget. Our first source had
said those involved might be fired.
The
House of Representatives had asked government to order the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission, EFCC, and the Independent Corrupt Practices and other
Related Offences Commission, ICPC, to arrest and prosecute top civil servants
behind the budget padding scandal.
On
its part, the Senate said, apart from the prosecution of the civil servants,
the Minister of National Planning and Budget, Udo Udoma, and other top
officials of the ministry should also be sanctioned.
“However,
the official exonerated the minister, saying “That the budget could be
presented the day it was presented and in the manner it was done was due to the
extra effort and hard work by the ministers who inherited what the civil
servants had already prepared.
By the time they took
over, most of the ministers did not have a good grasp of the details of the
budget of their ministries”.
No comments:
Post a Comment