- Apologises For Offensive Comments
The rift between the National Assembly and the minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunda Fashola over the 2017 Appropriation Act may have been put to rest following interactions between the minister and members of the House of the Representatives on Friday.
Fashola who denied ever targeting the National Assembly for insult in his comments on the budget fallout told the lawmakers that it was never his intention to disparage the legislature knowing the constitutional roles they play in deciding appropriations.
Fashola appeared before the Rep. Aliyu Sani Madaki-led House of Representatives adhoc committee to investigate the minister’s comments disparaging the National Assembly over issues relating to budget cuts in the 2017 appropriation Act.
Apologising for any offence that may have been taken from his comments, the former Lagos state governor said: “We don’t challenge your powers to determine budgets.
“If you have no role, the budget won’t even come to you in the first instance”.
“Nobody is questioning your powers on this, and nobody knows your constituencies better than yoursleves.
“But where does the needs of constituencies over shadow nationally projected interventions as passionately indicated in the budget we submitted?
“Like I’ve said before, I’m not fighting the parliament, and if my statement carried a different meaning that suggested insult to members of the parliament, I want to say here that I’m sorry about that.
“I apologise for any hard feelings that my statements may have generated.
”It was never my intention to disparage this House and if any offence was taken with what I’ve said, I apologise for that”, Fashola told his visibly combative hosts.
Answering questions from panel members on why roads in other parts of the country are not getting attention of the Ministry, a situation which has raised questions regarding the sincerity of the APC administration, the minister said president Muhammadu Buhari has 3 priority projects he’s focusing on.
He listed the priority projects to include, the 2nd Niger Bridge, the Lagos – Ibadan Expressway and the Ilorin-Jebba – Mokwa road.
Fashola however told the lawmakers that work has since stalled on the projects due to paucity of funds as contractors having found out that what was appropriated in the budget is not even enough to clear oustanding debt of over N13billion.
“President Buhari asked me to prioritise 3 projects, the 2nd Niger Bridge, Ilorin – Jeba – Mokwa road, and Lagos – Ibadan expressway.
“As I speak, we are owing outstanding of N13.5billion to contractors. We requested for N31billion to clear that and then fund the project with the balance but what was appropriated was N10billion.
This goes to say that there’s not much we can do with this, because it can’t even pay the debt that we owe.
“Immediately it became known that this was the position in the budget, the contractor took a position, as well as the other contractor who wrote to say that the were suspending further works on the projects we gave them”, he said.
Asked why won’t government adopt direct funding for the 2nd Niger Bridge just as he said that he would have preferred that government adopts a direct funding approach for the Lagos – Ibadan – expressway, Fashola said “the public private partnership (PPP) arrangement is usually time consuming but due to paucity of funds, government tends to consider it as an option, but using direct budgeting to fund projects would create jobs and deliver projects on time”.
“We need to change our budgeting system and simplify the process where we do less of paper work and condition ourselves to what is expedient in the mean time so the we won’t take forever trying to develop our country”, he added.
The lawmakers who accepted the minister’s apologies however cautioned that issues of governance should tackled using officially utilised avenues instead of the media, assuring the minister of National Assembly’s support to ensure that he succeeds in delivering on his ministry’s projects
