Kolade Faults NASS Over Scrapping Of SURE-P
Chairman of the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme committee (SURE-P), Dr. Christopher Kolade, yesterday, faulted the National Assembly on its pronouncement that his committee was not necessary because it was a redundant duplication by government to carry out the duties of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). He also said the legislative arm of government was just expressing an opinion which they were entitled to.
“That is their opinion, any Nigerian can have opinion about this, what people need to do is to study what is going on and see in what ways SURE-P is adding value to what is already on ground, nobody is denying that Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) are working. That is what government is there for”, he stated.
He also denied allegation by the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) that the SURE-P money to the states were being distributed to PDP and their cronies instead of the special purpose, and said that he was not aware of such development.
Addressing State House Correspondents after presenting the 2012 report of SURE-P to President Goodluck Jonathan at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, Kolade noted that when the president discovered that special funds would accrue from the partial subsidy removal last year January.
in a special way to intervene so that if, for instance, road contract was awarded say in 2006 and it is still not finished, by putting some funds from SURE-P, you can accelerate the finishing of that road”.
Kolade stated, “These are special funds and they are special intervention funds, they cannot be compared with what is ongoing in the ministries because Ministries are doing their normal work.
For example, the railway system, for years now, it has not been possible to move from Lagos to Kano entirely by rail because there were gaps on the way, places where bridges are broken down.
“NRC has been doing its best to get those things repaired but with these special intervention funds in 2012, SURE-P went and constructed the bridges where they are broken down, repair the roads where they should be repaired and now since the end of November, it is possible to ride on a train from Lagos to Kano.
“That was not happening before; we are even told by a cement company that because of this ability now to ride by rail from Lagos to Kano, they are shipping their cement in bulk by rail from Ewekoro all the way to Minna, that is adding value and it doesn’t disturb the normal work of Nigeria Railway Corporation”.
Spurning the allegation by the ACN that PDP cronies were siphoning the SURE-P money in the state, he said, “What the political parties said is not something that we know anything about. The money that we are using for our projects, the money that we are putting to the activities that this committee is overseeing are going specifically to contractors that are working on these projects and to people that are getting employed on these projects.
“If there is a situation between political parties where they are alleging that money is going from one place to another, they are not seeing it. Well that is politics; it has nothing to do with our committee”.
Asked whether there was a way to check how states disburse their own SURE-P funds, following announcement by a governor that he wants to spend the money to fight HIV/AIDS, he said, “If you check the constitution of the country, everything the Federal Government does with the states is governed by the constitution. The constitution tells you that once the allocation is made to the state, the authority for dispensing that money belongs to the state”.
On the report submitted to President Jonathan, he said, “We are very satisfied with our performance in the last one year. Although we were inaugurated in February, we did not get the first release of funds to our committee until July so the first six months of the year had passed. In the remaining six months of the year, we actually did work to the tune of over N70 billion.
“If we had N180 billion for the whole year and we spent N70 billion plus in six month, it means that we worked at the rate we were supposed to work. You know that the beginning of something new is bound to take off slowly, it cannot suddenly start running. It was a normal start and it was accelerating as we went through the year.
“It was in February last year that the SURE-P committee was inaugurated, having worked through the rest of 2012, it was good time to come and give the President a report of our activities in that year, especially as we have now started a new year. This meeting was to give President the annual report of SURE-P for the year 2012.
“We are here to tell the President that we have been doing the work that he expected us to do according to the mandate, there are different areas of work, infrastructure, building roads, rails, mass transit and also maternal and child healthcare, we have been active in all those areas and we gave the President an update of what we have done.
“In some of those areas and we can actually point to a lot of thousands of young Nigerians that are now benefiting from the employment programme, from the vocational training programme, from the graduate internship scheme. So that was what the report was about”.
On the committee’s focus for 2013, Kolade said, “If you look at our budget, it is still the same areas such as social safety nets; things that will help the health of women, children, employment to young people, things that will enable these young people to express themselves as citizens of this country and in areas of infrastructure such as building of roads, completion of rails.
“These are things necessary for people in business and commerce because if you take any of the major roads we have and you see the state of the roads, the intervention we are doing is to help those roads to be more motorable, build them into roads that can take commercial traffic and human traffic.
“In 2013, the media should be on the lookout and ask people who are beneficiaries of the projects if the roads in their areas are better”.
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