The Federal Government incurred “illegal” expenditure
totaling N4.17tn between 2004 and 2012,
a report by the House of Representatives has shown.
The document was prepared as an interim report by the House
Committee on Public Accounts as part of ongoing investigations into the
operations of Ministries, Departments and Agencies of the Federal Government.
The expenditure was incurred in what the committee termed
“abuse” of the Service Wide Vote.
The vote is provided annually in the nation’s budget to take
care of emergencies and “contingencies” that crop up in the course of the year
for which a budgetary provision is not made.
The findings of the committee, which is headed by Mr. Adeola
Olamilekan, matched earlier queries the Office of the Auditor-General of the
Federation raised on the abuse of the vote.
Part of the report, which The PUNCH obtained in Abuja on
Sunday, reads, “Contrary to the foregoing (using the vote for emergencies),
after its examination of the Auditor-General’s reports on the accounts of MDAs,
the committee discovered indiscriminate use of the vote in funding government projects and programmes that
should otherwise have been provided for in the annual budget, as such
expenditure were never contingent in nature.”
The report indicated that the N4.17tn was N2.27tn higher
than the N1.8tn the National Assembly approved as service wide vote for the
period under review.
This implies that, while the legislature appropriated N1.8tn
as service vote, the government spent N4.17tn, incurring extra-budgetary
spending of N2.2tn in the process.
A part of the report
reads, “In terms of figures, successive governments have, from 2004 to 2012,
spent a whopping N4.17tn as against the N1.8tn approved by the National
Assembly as SWV component of budgets of those years.
“This translates to N2.2tn extra-budgetary spending or 220
per cent of the SWV budget of the years covered by this report.”
The report added that the only “real emergency spending”
from the vote that could be justified was the funding of military operations
against militancy in the Niger Delta and the Boko Haram insurgency.
According to the report, the two security challenges(Niger
Delta militancy and Boko Haram insurgency) gulped N144.4bn between 2009 and
2012.
The committee clarified that the N144.4bn excluded regular
budgetary provisions for these sub-heads.
It also stated that
other expenditure captured in the report were done in breach of the aim of the
SWV.
For example, the report said N1.2bn was spent on the
overseas trips of government officials to seek medical attention.
Former Liberian President, Mr. Charles Taylor’s upkeep while
he sojourned in Nigeria between 2004 and 2005,
gulped N250m.
The report added,
“Most of the expenditure to which the SWV releases were deployed were routine
in nature and did not qualify for emergency funding.
“They included expenditure on overseas medical trips for selected
public servants and individuals; upkeep of former Liberian President, Charles
Taylor; payments to individuals and corporate bodies as judgment debts against
the federal government, etc.”
The committee noticed a pattern of increase in releases from
the SWV from 2007 to 2012, with 2010 to 2012 recording the highest spending of
N1.7tn.
“The period 2007 to 2012 witnessed astronomical increases in
SWV releases to the MDAs.
“Releases to MDAs during the period amounted to N3.5tn;
releases in 2012 and 2010 topped the list with N900.6bn and N864.2bn
respectively.
“It is evident that releases to the MDAs from the SWV during the period ranged
from 65.88 per cent to 344.4 per cent of recurrent allocations to the affected
MDAs.”
One of the key recommendations of the committee to the House
was that the N2.2tn extra-budgetary spending during the period “should be
investigated and those found culpable should be sanctioned.”
It also called for the scrapping of the vote if it could not
be managed in such as way as to plug the loopholes in the management of the
vote.
No comments:
Post a Comment