Shock and disbelief enveloped the committee room where the defence of the 2016 budget was ongoing in the Senate on Monday, when the Health Minister, Professor Isaac Adewole, announced that the original budget of his ministry had been distorted and strange figures smuggled in.
The minister’s disclosure further reinforced a recent discovery that some unscrupulous Nigerians had imported strange figures into the 2016 budget in pursuit of their greed and corrupt tendencies. Last week for instance, Senate Committee on Education discovered N10 billion tucked into the education budget.
Consequently, the minister told the committee to discard the budget before it and await a new one to be re-submitted today which he said would reflect the programmes of the health sector in 2016.
The revelation compelled the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Senator Lanre Tejuosho, to announce an imminent executive session with the minister with a view to thrashing out emerging issues on the budget as the minister further disclosed that there were some issues on which conclusion had not been reached by the ministry and yet allocations had been made to them without the ministry’s knowledge.
According to Adewole, the provisions of the budget before the National Assembly was in contrast with the priorities of the health sector as contained in the original budget it prepared, adding that some of the votes earmarked by the ministry for some activities had been re-distributed while some important fields in the sector had been excluded.
He said: “In the revised budget as re-submitted, N15.7 billion for capital allocation has been moved to other areas. Some allocations made are not in keeping with our priorities. There is nothing allocated to public health and family health. Over the last two years, nothing has been done on HIV…
“We have to look into the details of the budget and re-submit it to the committee. 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.”
Responding, the chairman said given the submission of the Minister, the budget before the committee was not the proposal of the Health Ministry and would therefore be of no use working on a budget that had already been disowned.
“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,” Tejuosho said.
In a swift response, Adewole said, “yes, it’s not. We‘ll submit the revised document tomorrow (today). It will be an updated version of what you have.”
Adewole also disclosed that 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.
Explaining that the ministry 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.
