Reps pick hole in energy commission’s 2021 expenditure

From Okwe Obi, Abuja

House of Representatives Committee on Finance has faulted the Energy Commission of Nigeria’s 2021 expenditure.

At its hearing on the 2023 to 2025 Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), yesterday, in Abuja, the committee noted that there was uneven records of remittances of the commission and that of the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF). The records earlier submitted by the commission showed that N13.63 million was remitted in 2021 while that of the OAGF showed N27 million.

A member of the committee, Stanley Olajide, said a status inquiry should be carried out in both agencies to determine which the correct figure is. “I think with this discrepancy we are looking at right here, a status inquiry is required; because for this to be going on, I mean we are talking about tax payers’ money. How can we have a process when money is sitting in Central Bank of Nigeria account and we do not know what agency will be created for it, I think it is absurd, we need to go deep to find out what is going on here. Secondly Mr. Chairman, looking at their submission, every year, all these agencies come here and it is just about coming for a piece of the pie, we are loaning money to fund all these budgets. Two billion naira in grants received and you are talking about one per cent return on investment, director in finance, who does that?

“Let’s just look at 2021, N2.4 billion received and look at the kind of remittance you are talking about, N13 million and we are talking about running a nation. There is a committee talking about merging all these agencies, if their agency refuse to perform the way we need to, maybe it’s time for us to collapse it into something else, return on investment matters now with what we are going through in Nigeria.”

Another member of the committee, John Dyeh, instructed the commission to furnish the committee with details of all the expenditures made by the commission between 2020 and 2021.

“Recurrent grants received, N2.4 billion in 2021, IGR N13 million, operating expenses N2.46 billion, I mean we must have details of the expenditure…”