· Senate Grills Minister over N250m
Chisaa Okoye
The Senate Committee on Information, on Tuesday expressed shock that the Minister of Information and Culture, Mr. Lai Mohammed spent a whopping N19 million on international travels, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
The minister made the shameful disclosure when he led some top officials of the ministry to defend their 2021 budget estimates before the lawmakers at the National Assembly in Abuja.
Mohammed claimed that he spent N19 million out N43 million on international travels at a time the world economy was in distress following the COVID-19 pandemic that crippled activities and hampered economic growth.
He told the visibly angry lawmakers that the N19million was spent on international travels by representatives of the ministry in less than three months – January to March before the COVID-19 lockdown was imposed. Recall that the COVID-19 lockdown took effect in March.
The minister listed the trips to include the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) conferences, which held in Spain and the United Kingdom respectively.
The committee also discovered that Lai Mohammed failed to deliver on a project listed as ‘Completion of NTA Gashua Sub-Station Ongoing’ despite that the N250 million allocated for the said project had been released to the ministry.
When asked by the committee to explain why the project has not been executed to a reasonable level despite the 100 per cent fund released for its execution in the 2020 fiscal year, Mohammed claimed that the project was sponsored by a lawmaker as constituency project and inserted into the 2020 budget.
He also claimed that the fund was released on September 24, 2020, making it imposible to execute the project to a considerable level.
But the committee members, who disagreed with the minister for tagging the project as a constituency one, pointed out that a constituency project could not have been included in the projects for budget defence.
However the minister has promised to furnish the committee with further details of the project.