N323 BILLION EAST-WEST ROAD: Reps give Niger Delta Ministry 48 hrs on contracts

The House of Repre­sentatives has beamed its searchlight on con­tracts awarded for the all-important East-West Road in the Niger Delta region – and is unhappy with what it saw.

The House on Monday de­manded details of all the con­tracts awarded by the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, many of which have not been executed.

The Reps accused the min­istry officials of hoarding vital information and gave the min­istry a 48-hour deadline to pro­duce the details of the N323 bil­lion contract on the dualisation of the East-West road, which begins in Rivers State.

The amount involved in the contract was disclosed at an investigative hearing by the committee with officials of the ministry, led by the Permanent Secretary, Mr. William Nwank­wo Alo.

After listening to Alo’s pres­entation, the committee said that the ministry had been denying the Lower Chamber of the Na­tional Assembly the opportunity to see the project’s contract agree­ment and relevant documents on the release of funds, the current state of the project and outstand­ing payments.

But Alo claimed that the agree­ment was within the lawmakers’ reach.

At their last meeting, the com­mittee had demanded the docu­ments, which the ministry did not forward to the panel.

Following the committee’s in­sistence on the new deadline, Alo said that the 48-hour ultimatum was too short for him to repro­duce the documents in 40 copies.

He said that the sensitive na­ture and volume of the documents made the task very difficult.

Alo said: “As I speak with you, there is no electricity in the minis­try to reproduce the documents for you in 48 hours.

“We will therefore plead for two weeks, considering the volume of the documents you are asking for and their quality. It’s not some­thing we can do in a hurry. We are not also expected to take govern­ment documents to commercial centres for production and repro­duction”.

The Committee Chairman, Hon. Kingsley Chinda, insisted on the directive and announced the members’ willingness to con­duct an assessment tour of the pro­ject after their next meeting with the officials to ensure that the com­mittee would not be misled by the report of the ministry.

Although the next hearing was slated for Monday next week, a member of the committee, Hon. Gabriel Onyenwife (APGA-An­ambra) wondered why the minis­try mobilised the contractors han­dling the four sections of the road up to N312 billion, leaving N11 bil­lion as outstanding, when the pro­jects had not been completed.

Meanwhile, the 2013 audit re­port of the Auditor-General of the Federation has indicted the min­istry for discrepancies in the han­dling of the contracts, where only 24 percent had been done despite the fact that over 50 percent mobi­lisation fee had been paid.

Alo however insisted that the current completion statuses of the contracts were at 91 percent, add­ing that the ministry followed due process in the awards and pay­ments approved by the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) and the Federal Executive Council (FEC).

Also, yesterday, the Lower House picked holes in the current exchange rate of the Naira to the Dollar and accused the Federal Government of not doing enough to get the country out of the cur­rent recession.

The lawmakers said that the official exchange rate of N305/dol­lar in the 2017 Budget would en­gender huge corruption in the sys­tem as the naira now exchanges for N500/dollar at the parallel market.

The lawmakers also queried the domestic borrowing plan of President Muhammadu Buhari, declaring that it would stifle funds for the real sector and small busi­nesses to grow the economy and move the country out of recession.

Of the N2.321 trillion bor­rowing plan in the 2017 Budg­et, N1.253 trillion is meant to be sourced from the domestic market.

At an interactive session be­tween members of the Executive and the House Committees on Fi­nance, Appropriation, Aids, Loans and Debt Management, Legislative Budget and Research and Nation­al Planning and Economic Devel­opment on the Medium Term Ex­penditure Framework (MTEF) and Fiscal Strategy Paper (FSP), the lawmakers said that the gov­ernment was not doing enough to check inflation which at present stands at 18.55 percent.

the Police to constitute a pan­el to investigate the crisis that trailed the rerun elections in Rivers State was illegal, unlaw­ful, unconstitutional and null and void.

He said it will be in the inter­est of justice for the court to set aside the IGP’s letter to Gover­nor Wike and direct the Police boss to await the outcome of the commission of inquiry set up by the governor.

An affidavit in support of the motion exparte averred that security personnel, mainly the Police and the Army, orchestrat­ed the violence that rocked the just concluded rerun election in Rivers State.

Mr Harrison Obi, of Chief Mike Ozekhome’s chambers, who deposed to the affidavit, said the actions of the security personnel were caught on video and presented to Nigerians and the whole world by various rep­utable television stations.

He averred that after the election, Governor Wike set up a commission of inquiry to look into the immediate and remote causes of the crisis that trailed the conduct of the elections, with a view to avoiding similar occurrence in subsequent elec­tions and punishing the perpe­trators of the act.

The commission of inquiry, he said, was set up under the Commission of Inquiry Law, Cap 30, Laws of Rivers State, which only Governor Wike, as the Chief Security Officer of the state, is legally empowered to constitute.

Ozekhome told Justice Kolawole that the terms of ref­erence of the panel of investiga­tion set up by the Police clearly suggest that the goal of the in­tended investigation is already pre-determined and biased or likely to be biased against Wike, having regard to the numerous conclusions already reached in the said letter.

Ozekhome said the inten­tion of the Police is to produce a predetermined damning re­port against Wike through the medium of the Commission of Inquiry, adding that, “the de­fendants are working from the answer to the question with the predetermined objective of convicting the 2nd plaintiffs (Wike)”.

With conclusions already drawn and reached by the Po­lice, without hearing from Wike, he said the Police boss has already “convicted” the gover­nor unheard and is merely us­ing the alleged investigation as a smokescreen and rubber stamp Members of the committees at the meeting also accused the Fed­eral Government of inadequate consultation with stakeholders, especially the National Assem­bly, when it developed the MTEF, adding that the parameters in the budget were different from those in the MTEF initially submitted to the National Assembly.

The Minister of Budget and National Planning, Sen. Udo Udo­ma, said that government had a multi-facetted plan to move the country out of recession.

On inflation, he said: “it is our objective to move towards a very low inflation environment to have sustainable growth.

“We believe that as the Central Bank had said, many of the things that were feeding into the inflation in 2016 are that once we can stabi­lise the exchange rate and other as­pects of the economy, we will re­duce the rate of inflation.

“But we need to do a lot more than that. We need to reduce the cost of doing business and we have a number of plans to achieve that. We need to get Nigerians back to work. We need to get single digit interest loans particularly in the key areas such as agriculture and all that to get people back to work. Already the Central Bank is work­ing on that.”

Udoma said that the Execu­tive was doing a lot which it be­lieves will restructure the economy.

According to him, the chal­lenging phase the country is pass­ing through is seen on the part of the Executive as an opportunity “to change things in a fundamen­tal way.”

The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, said that the gov­ernment had put a lot of measures in place to stimulate the economy. She said people should be care­ful about putting their faith in the black market as it drives inflation.

On Treasury Single Account (TSA), the minister said it was counter-productive to put mon­ey in commercial banks only for them to loan it back to govern­ment at higher rates.

Adeosun said that the govern­ment was “spending more on in­frastructure to bring us out of the recession”.

Also present at the session were officials of the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mines and Solid Min­erals Development, Office of the Accountant-General of the Fed­eration, the Nigerian National Pe­troleum Corporation (NNPC), Ni­gerian Customs Service (NCS).

Others were the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), the Debt Management Office (DMO), the CBN and the Department of Pe­troleum Resources (DPR).

  – Authority