I have no hands in that budget, health minister tells Senate

 

The alleged activities of the cartel in the federal civil service tagged ‘Budget Mafia’, was again highlighted on Monday when the Minister of Health Prof. Isaac Adewole lamented that the budget proposal of his ministry before the Senate had been tampered with.

He told members of the Senate Committee on Health that strange figures which he was unaware of had been smuggled into the budget.

He therefore pleaded with the committee to discard the budget proposal before it and await a new estimate to be re-submitted Tuesday.

According to him, the new proposal would reflect the Federal government’s programmes of the health sector for the year.

He said, “This was not what we submitted. We’ll submit another one. We don’t want anything foreign to creep into that budget. What we submitted is not there. We have not reached that stage and we find the money there.

“We have to look into the details of the budget and re-submit it to the committee.”

Thereafter, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Senator Lanre Tejuosho, was forced to convene a closed door session with the minister, apparently to discuss the development.

Adewole informed the committee, that allocations were made without the ministry’s knowledge on some health issues in which conclusions had not been reached.

He insisted, that the budget before the National Assembly was in contrast with the original budget the ministry prepared and submitted to the budget office.

Read also: Review… On the so-called ‘budget mafia’

He noted that some of the votes earmarked by the ministry for some activities had been re-distributed while some important areas in the sector had been excluded.

The committee chairman noted that given the submission of the minister, the budget before the committee was not the proposal of the Health Ministry. And that it would be out of place to work on a budget that had already been disowned by the minister.”

He said:  “Honourable minister, we need to have an executive session. You said about this budget that public health is not there. Obviously, the budget we are looking at now is not your own.”

Adewole responded: “Yes, it’s not. We’ll submit the revised document tomorrow (today). It will be an updated version of what you have.”

The minister also said State House Clinic to which N3.9 billion had been allocated in the budget at the expense of other hospitals put together which got far less allocations, is not under the supervision of the Ministry of Health.

He explained that the clinic is under the Presidency.

Adewole said the figure might not have been the original allocation to the clinic by State House, noting that the original allocation might have been inflated by the same forces, which, he said, had distorted his ministry’s original estimates.

 

 

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