Peter Obi, the presidential candidate for the Labour Party (LP), stated on Wednesday that important concerns arising from Senator Abdul Ningi’s charge have not been resolved by the Senate’s suspension of Ningi.
According to Obi, the Senate still needs to provide the Nigerian people with a thorough explanation of all of the allegations and denials, especially the one pertaining to the executive branch of government.
In addition, the former governor of Anambra State said that the upper house need to actually tell Nigerians of the precise sums allotted for constituency projects so that the people can appropriately monitor their execution.
He made this known on Wednesday in a statement on his X handle.
The announcement came after the Senate suspended Senator Ningi for three months.
Remember when Ningi, a Bauchi politician, was suspended for three months after he said that N3.7 trillion had been added to the 2024 budget?
Ningi is the senatorial district representative for Bauchi Central in the National Assembly’s upper house.
Obi asserted, however, that new accusations about the Senate leadership’s indiscriminate and uneven distribution of constituency projects have also surfaced.
In view of the severe suffering the country is experiencing, he continued, the nation urgently needs to cease wasting its limited resources.
Obi said, “The fuss over the alleged N3 trillion padded into the 2024 budget raised by a Senator still rages as the Senate’s reaction of suspending the whistle-blower has not addressed vital issues emanating from the allegation.
“The Senator is insisting on his allegation and the Executive agreed that there was only N1.2trillion padded not N3 trillion as alleged by the Senator. Fresh allegations have also cropped up over indiscriminate and unbalanced allocation of constituency projects by the Senate leadership.
“A civic society group, Budgit, through their official, have also added their voice to agree with the Senator. They allege that there was no detailed project allocations for about N3.7trn in the 2024 Appropriation Act.
“As the Senate suspension of the senator involved has not addressed the issue, they still owe the Nigerian public a clear clarification over the various claims and counterclaims, including that of the executive arm, to be able to know exactly what is happening, and also disclose to the public, the exact amounts allocated for constituency projects for appropriate monitoring of implementation by the public.
“I had particularly elucidated in my earlier comment on what we can use the N3 trillion to achieve, by showing that it is more than the national budget of the two most critical components of the human development index, health and education, combined.
“Now that the executive arm has accepted that the padded amount is only N1.2 trillion, it is still a very significant amount, when you consider that it is almost 5 times the N251.47 billion proposed for Universal Basic Education, which is the foundation of education, in the Country.
“Today in Nigeria, the greatest challenge to human resource development is education, which has been identified as most critical at the basic level.
“Nigeria has about 20 million out-of-school children today because of the poor investment in education. These are resources that would have been utilised to ensure that our children are taken off the streets and returned to schools.
“The N1.2 trillion which the executive branch admitted to have been padded, if channeled into any of the critical areas of development, could have positively impacted the nation and uplifted the people.
“And if indeed the report from Budgit is true, that there is about N3.7 trillion without any detailed project allocations, I strongly urge the Senate to do more detailed work of channelling these funds into the critical areas of development – education, health and pulling people out of poverty, which will in turn, minimise the criminality we are facing today.
“We must, as a matter of urgency, put a stop to all the wastage of our scarce resources, amid the excruciating hardship in the country.
“Let every penny of our public fund be used for public good. That is the only way to achieve the New Nigeria we are working towards.”
