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A civil society organization, BudgiT, has asked the Federal Ministry of Finance and the Budget Office of the Federation to make available the description and location of the capital projects the nation carried out in 2016, describing the feedback it received as “an inadequate response,” for not including breakdown of the expenditure.
The organization, relying on the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2011, also requested to be furnished with the amount budgeted for and allocated to each of the projects in the 2016 Budget.
BudgiT, on Tuesday, made public on the social media the request it had made via follow-up letters to the government, dated October 11, 2017. The body has sought to know the details of the capital projects the government said it carried out with a sum of N1, 219, 471, 747, 443, in six headers contained in a letter through which the Federal Ministry of Finance responded to the first request made by BudgiT.
“We have been following up with FG on the claim that N1.2tn was RELEASED for Capital Expenditure in 2016 Budget cycle,” BudgiT said in the Facebook post. “We got an inadequate response & we have requested again.”
The body had on August 22, 2017, written it would like to know the details of the expenditure in question after the Federal Government made an announcement via online newspapers that it spent the said amount on capital projects.
“We would like to have the detailed information with project description, project location, amount released to the project in the 2016 budget, and the budgeted amount for the project in the 2016 budget,” requested BudgiT.
The response from the Federal Ministry of Finance, in a letter dated September 7, 2017, showed in the headers that the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing got a total capital released of N307, 411, 749, 682 or 25 percent of capital allocated.
It also revealed that Defence and Security got 14 per cent while Transport and Aviation, Agriculture and Water Resources, and Education and Health received 12, six and five per cent each. The header it tagged others got 38 percent of the allocation or N463, 234, 558, 786 total capital released.
The October 11 letters were addressed to the Minister of Finance and Director General of Budget Office of the Federation and BudgiT has also requested for response within the seven days as stipulated in the Freedom of Information Act.
