Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) may get this year’s budget earlier than before, likely in April 2016, according to a Senate committee. Previous budgets came in the middle of the year, with 2015 approved in the middle of May last year.
The Commission got N299.5 billion in 2015 and N322.6 billion in 2014, but 2016 is expected to be far less. The 2015 approved budget is expected to be active till now, but scarcity of funds seems to ravage all government agencies including the NDDC.
The chairman of the committee on NDDC, Niger Delta Ministry and Amnesty, Peter Nwaoboshi, said in Uyo at the weekend that the financial appropriations for the Commission would be ready within one month after the passage of the Federal Government’s budget.
The Federal Government budget is expected to be approved in March, but Nwaoboshi said: “I can assure you that as soon as we get the budget, we will work on it expeditiously. We are already collating facts. In fact, with what we have seen on the ground, we are set to go. As soon as the Federal Government’s budget is passed, within one month, you can be sure that we will get the NDDC budget out.”
This means April 2016, a month after the federal budget is out of the National Assembly.
The committee chairman explained that one of the reasons for the late approval of NDDC budgets in the past was because it had to wait for the passage of the Federal Government’s budget to know what had been allocated to it.
Senator Nwaoboshi said: “We will not allow what happened in the general budget to happen to the NDDC budget. This time, we are going to go through the budget line by line to determine the relevance of the projects to the people of the Niger Delta. We will see whether that is what they deserve and what they demand before allocating funds for the projects. It is not going to be a budget for projects to be scattered everywhere and nothing is achieved at the end of the day.”
He went on; “People should understand that we are in the 8th Senate. We are not just going to allocate money for no particular purpose. We are going to look at the projects for which the money is being allocated. This time, if we identify a project and we think that it is relevant to the people, we will make budgetary provision for it.”
The committee chairman said further: “One of the things we have gained from our visits to the project sites is that it has exposed us to certain facts that were unknown to us previously. We are going to look at these projects and make sure that they are funded, especially those that are of great importance to the people of the Niger Delta. It is not going to be business as usual.”
He went on: “The NDDC has asked state governments to make inputs into its 2016 budget. It is not going to be just any kind of contribution. We won’t allow special interests from government officials to use that as an opportunity to feather their own nests. We are going to make sure that the proposed projects are relevant to the people of the Niger Delta.”
