Juliet Akoje in Abuja
Members of the House of Representatives Committee on Finance yesterday frowned at the expenditures of the Energy Commission of Nigeria.
During its hearing on the 2023- 2025 Medium Term Expenditure Framework, the committee expressed displeasure with the discrepancy between records of remittances of the Commission and that of the Account General of the Federation.
The records earlier submitted by the Commission had shown that it remitted N13.63 million in 2021, while that of the OAGF had shown N27 million.
A member of the Committee, Hon. Stanley Olajide, said a status inquiry should be carried out in both agencies to determine the correct figure.
He added: “With the difference we are looking at right here, a status inquiry is required because for this to be going on, I mean we are talking about tax payers’ money.
“How can we have a process when money is sitting in CBN account and we do not know what agency will be created for it, I think it is absurd, we need to go deep to find out what is going on here.
“Looking at their submission, every year all these agencies come here and it is just about coming for a piece of the pie, we are loaning money to fund all these budgets.”
He further stated that, “two billion in grants received and you are talking about one per cent return on investment, Director in Finance, who does that?
“Looking at 2021, N2.4 billion was received and look at the kind of remittance you are talking about – N13 million and we are talking about running a nation?
“There is a committee talking about merging all these agencies, if their agency refuse to perform the way we need to, maybe it’s time for us to collapse it into something else, return on investment matters now with what we are going through in Nigeria.”
Also, Hon. John Dyeh consequently demanded that the Commission should furnish the Committee with details of all the expenditures made by the commission between 2020 and 2021.
‘Recurrent grants received, N2.4 billion in 2021; IGR – N13 million, operating expenses – N2.46 billion. I mean we must have details of the expenditure; you received N2.4 billion and you expended everything, we must see the details, Nigerians must see these details.”
The Director of Finance of the Commission, Mr. Clestus Nna told the committee earlier that the commission had receipts for funds remitted in the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF).
