Health Minister Says Civil Servants Smuggled Strange Figures into His Ministry’s Budget

Posted by African Examiner Featured, Latest Headlines, News Tuesday, February 9th, 2016

Ayodele Afolabi, Abuja

ABUJA, NIGERIA (AFRICAN EXAMINER) – The Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, has alleged that original budget of his ministry had been distorted and strange figures smuggled in.

The minister made the disclose a week after similar revelation of some unscrupulous Nigerians from the federal civil service paddling strange figures into the 2016 budget in pursuit of their greed and corrupt tendencies one of which was the N10 billion tucked into the education budget.

The minister told the committee to discard the budget before it and await a new one to be re-submitted today (Tuesday) 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 (APC Ogun Central), 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 the Minister, 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 (Tuesday). 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.

“The State House Clinic is not under the Ministry of Health. I hope it’s not the same rats that changed things in our budget that changed it. The amount is meant for procurement and purchase of medical equipment. It is very important that you engage them because what happened to us might have also happened to them. It is possible that what is there, might not have been what they put there,” the minister added.

Reacting to that again, Tejuosho said having been declared by the minister that State House Clinic was not under the watch of the Health Ministry, it also implied that the Health Committee’s oversight function did not extend to the clinic, noting that it is the responsibility of the Special Duties’ Committee to engage the State House on the humongous budget for the clinic.