Benue: Poor Conditions Of Federal Roads Not Natn'l Assembly's Fault

On the state of road infrastructure in Benue State, the National Assembly said that it is not to blame for the poor condition of the federal roads in the state.

This comes as a response to the remarks by the Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, who said that the terrible roads in Benue State should be blamed on the National Assembly.

Rejecting the claims of the minister is the spokesman for the Senate, Ajibola Basiru, who said, “Much as the upper chamber would not want to engage in any unnecessary altercation with the minister, it is, however, necessary to speak up because the issue of roads infrastructure is too important and controversial a matter to be ignored where the National Assembly has been fingered by a serving minister.

“The records must be set right so that the two arms of government should not be seen as working at cross purposes in the course of delivering good governance to the electorate.

“For the 2020 fiscal year, the National Assembly approved the request for 265,868,037,093 billion naira for capital expenditure by the Executive. The Executive later brought a revised allocation of 256,734,983,667 billion naira which we also appropriated. As we speak, even in the budget proposal for 2021, the Executive proposed a capital expenditure of 363,266,425,976 billion naira.

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“The upper chamber cannot help but wonder where Mr. Fashola got his figure of 600 billion naira which he said was proposed by his ministry and allegedly not approved by the National Assembly. The Senate, therefore, invites Nigerians and specifically the minister’s guests from Benue South Senatorial District to note that figures do not lie.

“On the minister’s allegation that priority is given to constituency projects over other projects, is an attempt to set the National Assembly on collision course with the people they are democratically representing.

“It should be emphasized, therefore, that never has allocations specifically meant for other projects been diverted to constituency projects as the later have specific allocations in the budget.”