ABUJA – If proposals for the 2015 fiscal year is approved by the National Assembly, rehabilitation of federal roads for the year may well be a forgone conclusion.
This followed alleged “zero allocation” to the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) saddled with resurfacing dilapidated federal roads.
Making the disclosure yesterday in an interface with Sen. Ayogu Eze led Senate Committee on Works, the minister of works, Arc. Mike Onolememen added that all parastatals under his ministry were equally provided with zero allocation.
He told the Senate panel that the Federal Ministry of Works was indebted to the tune of N230 billion from outstanding payments certificates to contractors, adding that the allocations for the current fiscal year was grossly inadequate to meet up.
According to him, N39,579,312,175 was proposed as 2015 Budget for his ministry and its parastals for both capital and recurrent expenditures of which, the only capital budget proposal of N11.232 billion is for the main ministry.
Out of the N20,865,168,931 proposed overhead budget, N353,141,442 is for the main ministry, while N20,357,611,643 is for the parastatals; and the personnel cost is N7,636, 559,090 (IPPIS).
He however explained that the tight budget was informed by recent drop in the price of crude at the international market and that major capital projects in the 2015 fiscal year would be executed through Public Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement.
The minister further told the Senate Committee that out of N98,814,368,704 approved for the main ministry to execute capital projects in 2014, only N45,682,844,395 was released, leaving a balance of N53,131,524,309.
This, he noted, has adversely affected the progress of works on project sites across the country, stressing, performance of the ministry would have been considerably enhanced if the outstanding budgeted sum was released to his ministry.
“More importantly, if the cumulative outstanding budgeted funds of N203,392,075,947,.25 for the period spanning 2011 to 2014 had been released, the total indebtedness would have been brought down from N230 billion to N27 billion”, he added.

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