The House of Representatives’ Public Accounts Committee, PAC, in conduct of its oversight functions over Ministries, Departments, and Agencies(MDAs), at the Federal level has been unearthing startling revelations with regards to alleged mismanagement of COVID-19 intervention funds from 2020-2022.
Consequently, the committee has frowned at how the Federal Ministry of Water Resources reportedly sank a unit of borehole at between N12.5million and N25million.
Hon. Bamidele Salam (PDP-OSUN) and chairman of the committee further picked holes in the N4bn reportedly spent by the Ministry on the recruitment of 100 personnel for a period of three months for a project known as Youth Engagement for Sanitation (YES), across the 774 local government council areas in the country.
Mrs Didi Esther Walson-Jack, permanent secretary of the ministry, told the committee that the boreholes were sunk in some locations across the states of the Federatiom and the federal Capital Territory FCT Abuja
According to her; “in total, 299 new water schemes were embarked upon during the period just as a total of 188 rehabilitations, old and abandoned solar boreholes, were resuscitated during the period and that each state of the federation received 10million naira intervention items.”
But the dissatisfied members of the committee took turns to request for the real locations and existence of such projects in order to ascertain the authenticity and avoid mixing it up with projects earlier executed by members
The committee members also sought to know the modality adopted for recruitment of the personnel, full list of the youths, their account numbers, schedule of payments as sent to respective banks, and all other documents related to the project.
Hon. Bamidele Salam declared: “What I want this honourable committee to note is that we are going to do project verification. Not only for this ministry but for other Ministries, departments, and Agencies that have said they have done one project or the other. The committee will need to go and see exactly what is on the ground so that we can have value for money.”
Salam also announced the states to be visited for the physical verification to include: Osun and Ogun in South West; Akwa Ibom and Edo in South South; Imo and Ebonyi in South East; Kwara, Nasarawa and Benue in North Central; Katsina and Sokoto in North West as and Bauchi and Adamawa in North East.
Furthermore, the committee ordered the permanent secretary to tender all relevant documents related to every contract, procurement, and the certificates needed to execute them. on the next date of appearance.
