East-West Road: Produce N323bn contract agreement within 24hrs, Reps order ministry
The House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts on Monday issued a 48-hour ultimatum to the Ministry of Niger Delta to produce the contract agreement and all financial details relating to the dualization of the East-West Road in Rivers State.
The ultimatum was issued at an investigate hearing organized by the House committee which was attended by officials of the Niger Delta ministry, led by its Permanent Secretary, Mr. William Nwankwo Alo.
At yesterday’s session, the committee regretted that the ministry has persistently denied lawmakers the opportunity to see the contract agreement and all other relevant documents pertaining to the releases of funds, current state of contract execution and outstanding payments.
While the permanent secretary informed the House committee that the contract documents were within reach, the committee however frowned at the reluctance of the ministry to produce the documents demanded.
Responding to the ultimatum, Mr. Alo complained that the 48 hours given the ministry to produce all relevant documents relating to the East-West Road was too short for the ministry to reproduce 40 copies of the contract documents, as demanded by the committee, considering their sensitive nature and volume.
“As I speak with you, there is no light in the ministry with which to reproduce the documents for your in 48 hours.
“We will therefore plead for two weeks, considering the volume of the documents you are asking and their quality. It’s not something we do in a hurry. We are not also expected to take government documents to commercial centres for production and reproduction,” Alo said.
But the committee Chairman, Rep. Kingsley Chinda insisted that the ultimatum remains sacrosanct, even as he announced that the committee would conduct an assessment tour of the road project to ensure that the committee is not be misled by the documents that would be supplied by the ministry.
At Monday’s hearing, a member of the committee, Rep. Gabriel Onyenwife (APGA/Anambra) queried why the ministry mobilized the contractors handling the four sections of the road up to N312billion, leaving N11billion as outstanding payment when the projects has not been completed.
He quoted from the 2013 audit report of Auditor General of the Federation which according to him, indicted the ministry for discrepancies in the handling of the contract, where only 24 per cent had been accomplished, in spite of the fact that over 50 per cent mobilization had been paid to the contractor handling the project.
In his Defence, the permanent secretary stated that the current completion status of the contract was 91 per cent, maintaining that the ministry followed due process in the award of the contract and payments made to the contractor, adding that all the payments were approved by the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) and the Federal Executive Council.
