probes contract executed in B’Haram enclave

Nigeria Senate

The Senate  Committee on the Environment and Ecology, on Monday, queried the Federal Ministry of Environment for paying N21m to a contractor who claimed that his firm was currently executing a construction project in the Bama community of Borno State.

The committee has therefore directed the leadership of the ministry to institute a probe into the issue and forward their findings to the committee before the 2014 budget they submitted could be approved.

Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Mr. Taiye Haruna, had listed

the Bama road construction, which also included drainage work and erosion control as one of the 20 other constituency/intervention projects at different stages of execution and on which N1.4bn had been paid.

He stated this when he represented his minister, Mrs. Lawrencia Labaran-Mallam, during an oversight visit to the ministry headquarters in Abuja by members of the  senate committee, led by the Chairman,  Senator Bukola Saraki.

Haruna had drawn the anger of members of the committee when he claimed that his ministry had effectively implemented all the 20 constituency/intervention projects under its supervision and reeled out the details.

A member of the committee, Senator Boluwaji Kunlere, immediately drew the attention of the Permanent Secretary to the fact that there was no way any contractor could execute any project in Bama between July 2013 and now when the area had been fully occupied by the Boko Haram insurgents.

Kunlere, who is also a member of the Senate Committee on Security and Intelligence, alleged that the claims of the contractors were fraudulent because it was difficult for his team, accompanied by armed military personnel, to gain access to the area when they visited for oversight functions within the same period.

The Permanent Secretary referred the issue to a director in charge of the project who justified the N21m paid to the contractors when he said that convincing evidences, including documents and pictures, were presented to him.

Haruna however told the committee that the N1.4bn appropriated to the ministry for constituency projects had been fully disbursed to the various contractors that handled them.

He said his ministry generated N267m  as  Internally   Generated Revenue last year, and that given an enabling environment to operate, it could generate over N1bn as IGR.

The committee members however expressed dissatisfaction over the presentation of Haruna and threatened to recommend zero allocation to the ministry if its officials failed to convince them that money appropriated were being effectively utilised.