There’s no electricity to meet your 48-hour ultimatum, N’Delta ministry tells Reps

The Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, Mr. William Alo, on Monday told members of the House of Representatives committee on Public Accounts that there was no electricity in the ministry to enable it meet-up with the committee’s demand.

Reps committee on Public Accounts had given the ministry during an interactive session between the committee and the officials of the ministry, a 48-hour ultimatum to furnish it with the contract agreement and all financial details involving the dualization of East-West Road in Rivers State.

The committee accused the ministry of denying them the opportunity to sight the project’s contract agreement and relevant documents pertaining to release of funds, current state of contract and outstanding payments.

The committee’s demand followed the Auditor-General of the Federation’s query of 2013 which allegedly indicted the ministry on N323billion contract sum disbursement.

In his response, Alo said that though his ministry can fulfil the demand, he however protested that the 48 hours ultimatum given the ministry was too short for them to reproduce the documents in 40 copies, especially as the ministry has no electricity.

Read also: Pipeline bombardments have killed over 20,000, Osinbajo tells N’Deltans

“As I speak with you, there is no electricity in the ministry to reproduce the documents for your committee in 48 hours. We, therefore, plead for two weeks, considering the volume of the documents you are asking for and their quality. It is not something we can do in a hurry. We are not also expected to take government documents to commercial centres for reproduction,” Alo said.

The committee chairman, Kingsley Chinda, PDP, Obio/Akpor Federal Constituency, refused to shift ground. He instead announced that the committee members were going to conduct an assessment tour of the project after their next meeting with the officials, to make sure that the committee would not be hoodwinked by the documents the ministry is going to supply.

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