ABUJA – The House of Representatives committee on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and Humanitarian matters, has suspended the consideration of budget performance by the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced.
The need to suspend the consideration, according to the committee was to afford members the ample time to scrutinize the volume of documents provided by the commission.
Hon. Awaji Inombek Dagomie Abiante who moved motion said that there wasn’t enough time for the commission to consider such a voluminous documents dumped on members and expect them to approve same without going through every budget subhead and their level of implementation.
“We are here trying to birth a new Nigeria that our generation unborn can be proud of, and in doing so, we must do due diligence by critically looking at the books presented before us.
Abiante therefore moved that the chairman steps down the consideration to allow members study the 2020 performance as documented by the commissioner with a view to doing a good job of assessing it.
The motion was seconded by the chairman after putting the question before the members, who unanimously agreed on it.
The commissioner of the Refugees agency, Sen Bashir Garba Mohammed, had earlier told the committee that the sum of N5.7bn was appropriated for the agency as capital and recurrent expenditure in 2020, adding that the amount represent 36.5% increase from 2019.
He further said that the Overhead was N29m, just as he disclosed that the commission just awarded contracts due to the delay occasioned by covid-19 pandemic.
He disclosed that out of the total sum approved, only N4.2m for overhead had been released, while the sum of N2.1bn was approved for zonal intervention (constituency) projects for lawmakers.
“The Commission has capacity and full willingness to execute projects appropriated for in the 2020 budget”, in an appeal to the committee to help the agency extend the life of its capital budget implementation”.
