Temper rose on Tuesday during the closed doors session of the Senate over the “meagre” allocation of N387 billion for capital projects in the 2015 budget.
Senators, who were in the closed doors session, which lasted for about one and a half hours, accused the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, of deliberately proposing the “meagre” amount for capital expenditure.
It was gathered further the capital projects executed for 2014 was about 41 per cent and that last quarter release of capital budget has not been given to agencies.
A senator, who pleaded anonymity, said many senators expressed great anger against Okonjo-Iweala for “deliberately drawing back the wheel of the nation’s progress due to her failure to release monies for capital projects”.
The senator said: “All of us are not happy that most of the MDAs (Ministries, Departments and Agencies) could not execute any reasonable capital project this year because the little money released to them by the Finance Minister was not enough to pay the contractors who had executed projects for them in the past.”
Other senators who spoke to our reporter after the meeting said lawmakers expressed concern over the meagre allocation of N387 billion for capital projects in the 2015 budget.
This, they said, is unprecedented even as the recurrent component was allocated over 90 percent of the N4.3 trillion budget.
The lawmakers, it was later gathered, insisted that they will not approve such lopsided budget allocation.
Owing to this, the Senate committees were mandated to liaise with the various Ministries, Departments and Agencies to cut down on recurrent votes in order to make more fund available for projects.
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