Labour Party presidential candidate and former Anambra State governor, Peter Obi has urged the Senate to throw more light on the allegations of budget padding raised by Abdul Ningi rather than suspend the Senator representing Bauchi Central.
Senator Ningi was suspended for three months after he raised awareness to the budget padding, despite threats of sanctions, Ningi stood by his words and was subsequently given the marching orders after a rancourus debate on Tuesday.
Writing on X page Wednesday, Obi stated that suspending Senator Ningi would not resolve the matter adding that the Senate lead by Godswill Akpabio owe Nigerians an explanation.
“The Senator is insisting on his allegation, and the Executive agreed that there was only N1.2 trillion padded, not N3 trillion as alleged by the Senator. Fresh allegations have also cropped up over the indiscriminate and unbalanced allocation of constituency projects by the Senate leadership,” Obi wrote.
“A civic society group, Budgit, through their officials, has also added their voice to agree with the Senator. They allege that there were no detailed project allocations for about N3.7 trillion 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.”
