The House of Representatives, on Tuesday, asked the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, Hajiya Sadiya Farouk, to resign her position if she is not ready for the job.
The advice followed her several failures to appear before various Committees of the House to defend the ministry’s 2023 budget proposal.
Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriation, Rep. Muktar Betara, said this in Abuja during an investigative hearing on alleged insertion of N206 billion in the 2023 budget of the ministry.
The N206,242,395,000 billion is said to be for the National Social Safety Nets Project domiciled in the ministry, to be funded by the World Bank.
Betara had queried the minister’s absence during the budget to defence, where she was expected to explain the insertion, adding that if she is not ready for the job, she should quit.
“Most times the committee calls the minister, she refuses to come. If she is not ready for the job, she should quit,” Betara fumed.
Earlier, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Hajiya Zainab Ahmed, had said the item was wrongly coded by the Budget office.
She added that the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management should have called the attention of the budget office to the anomaly as her counterparts in other ministries did.
According to Ahmed, the said the Ministry of Defence, Federal Ministry of Power among others also committed the same error.
She called for collaboration among Ministries Department and Agencies (MDAs) of Government to forestall such oversight.
“The project was correctly described in the submission in the 2023 budget, but unfortunately the Budget Office used the wrong code,” the minister said.
She further said that resulted in it being captured as “Purchase of Security Equipment” in the budget preparation system.
She added that the budget preparation had a limited range of encoded programme and project descriptions.
The Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Dr Nasir Gwarzo, said the minister directed him to represent her.
“The minister said she did not understand the budget code; it was the media that reported the error as padding.
“We did not go to the media refuting the work the committee or the Ministry of Finance have done, but we wrote for clarification, which was given.
The amount of money in question was a counterpart funding that was given by the World Bank. If it was done without appropriation, Nigerian would not have known what was borrowed,” he said.
In their response, members of the Committee, Rep. Igariwey Enwo (PDP-Ebonyi) and the Deputy Chairman, Appropriation said the budget should not be subjected to controversy.
“We are talking about money we borrowed, we should also know how we spend the money.
“Raising unnecessary controversy about the budget will not augur well. There should be inter-agency coordination.
Rep Benjamin Kalu (APC-Abia) said: “My concern is that the image of our country should be protected in respect of the budget.
”I reached out to the minister of finance on the issue but nothing was done and I could not go ahead to give the media the information its needed at the point in time.”