Senate To Investigate 21m Naira Contract In Bama

The Senate Committee on Environment has announced plans to investigate a 21 million Naira contract awarded by the Ministry of Environment in Bama, Borno State.

During an oversight visit of the committee to the Federal Ministry of Environment, the members of the committee expressed scepticism that the drainage and erosion contract in Bama, Borno State were executed at all, as Bama had been under siege in the past few months. They were in doubt that increasing insurgency in the area could not have allowed construction workers to work.

In the past two weeks, the senate and the House of Representatives have been working on the 2014 budget.
Part of the budget process requires that government Ministries, Departments and Agencies bring their budget proposals to the National Assembly for scrutiny.
But the Senate Committee on Environment, led by Senator Bukola Saraki, did not wait for the Ministry of Environment to come to them; rather, the committee members were at the ministry to get answers to some worrying questions.

The Minister of Environment was away on official assignment so it was up to the Permanent Secretary, Taiye Haruna, to explain how much was appropriated for the ministry in 2013.
But midway into the briefing of the committee, the attention of lawmakers was drawn to a project in Kogi State which the permanent secretary had said was completed.

The lawmakers expressed displeasure with the ministry of the Kogi project and other projects.
Many Nigerians have said the budget defence exercise in the National Assembly had assumed the status of a yearly ritual where ministries present almost the same budget as previous years and more often cannot account for how the funds appropriated for projects were utilised.
But critics put the blame on federal lawmakers for failing to properly scrutinise these agencies, saying these lapses could have been discovered earlier.