The Minister for Science and Technology, Prof. Ita Bassey-Ewa, and members of the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology exchanged hot words on Tuesday over the 2012 budget performance of the ministry.
Trouble started when members of the Abiodun Akinlade-led committee, reviewed the budget performance of the ministry and instructed Bassey-Ewa to convert into percentage.
“It is your budget; give it to us in percentage, not item by item.What is the percentage of the performance?” Akinlade asked the minister.
Bassey-Ewa attempted to comply with the instruction, but could not come up with the percentage. This made Akinlade to accuse the minister of not taking the committee seriously whenever he was asked to respond to issues.
He recalled that during an oversight visit to the ministry last month, the minister had also failed to convert the budget performance to percentages.
Bassey-Ewa then shouted, “We are prepared, we are prepared! You can see that I have been trying to compute the percentages.”
He told the lawmakers that he responded the way he did because the committee members shouted at him.
Apparently angered by the minister’s response, the lawmakers staged a walk-out. The ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Rabi Shuaibu-Jimeta, later apologised to the committee on behalf of the minister.
Subsequently, the committee members promised to work on the 2013 budget of the ministry despite the minister’s reaction.
“We will pass the budget; we cannot stop working because of a minister or else it is Nigerians who will suffer,” Akinlade stated.
He also observed that Science and Technology was not listed as a priority ministry in the 2012-2014 Medium Term Expenditure Framework of the Federal Government.
He said, “The President in his MTEF earmarked six ministries as priority areas and unfortunately the Ministry of Science and Technology is not there.
“No country has ever enjoyed global attention without developing its Science and Technology potential. It will be difficult to move this country forward without developing our technology.”
Meanwhile, the Minister of State for Power, Mrs. Zainab Kuchi, has said that the management contract the Federal Government signed with Manitoba to take over the Transmission Company of Nigeria, suffered a hitch due to its “illegality and irregularities.”
“The contract was an illegality; necessary procedures were not observed,” Kuchi told the House Committee on Power on Tuesday.
She stated that following the discovery of the irregularities, President Goodluck Jonathan directed that the contract “should be put back on the table to resolve the issue of due process.”
According to the minister, the president’s directive did not suggest a cancellation of the contract as was widely interpreted but an effort to bring it in line with legal requirements.
“The Manitoba contract is the driver of the privatisation programme in the power sector. We cannot afford to allow it to fail any legal test because we are talking of international best practices.
“The truth is that the Manitoba contract has not been cancelled and no other company is competing with the firm ,” she added.
But, the Chairman of the committee, Mr. Patrick Ikhariale, disagreed with the minister.
Rather, he blamed the Bureau for Public Procurement for attempting to “derail a transaction that was already signed and sealed.”
He noted that the BPP itself had been operating without input from the National Council on Public Procurement as provided in its establishment Act.
“Both the Senate and the House passed resolutions calling for the NCPP to be put in place but this has not been done. The BPP should not be interfering unnecessarily by shifting the goalpost after a goal has been scored.The last may not have been heard of the Manitoba contract,” Ikhariale said.
Kuchi had appeared before the committee to defend the 2013 budget of the ministry.
The lawmakers expressed concern that Nigerians continued to experience power outages in spite of the huge spendings on the powe sector, submitting that there was poor utilisation of N15bn out of the money voted for the sector in 2012.
In the Rural Electrification Agency for instance, lawmakers pointed out about N2bn was left “idle” with less than 41 days to the end of the year.
While capital projects were not executed, the committee also found out that overhead costs had been drawn “100 per cent.”