SAN FRANCISCO, February 09, (THEWILL) – The Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole shocked members of the Senate Committee on Health when he revealed during the 2016 budget defence that the original estimate of his ministry had been largely distorted as strange figures were smuggled into the budget.
This sort of reaffirms the Senate’s claim that the 2016 budget had been tampered with as well as media reports that some senior civil servants have attracted the ire of President Muhammadu Buhari for embarrassing his government through padding of the budget.
Appearing before the Senate committee on Monday, Adewole urged the committee to discard the budget proposal before it and await a new estimate to be re-submitted on Tuesday which would reflect the programmes of the health sector for the year.
He told the committee that there were some health issues on which conclusions had not been made by the ministry and yet allocations were made on them without the ministry’s knowledge.
The minister insisted that 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 and submitted to the budget office.
He noted that some of the votes earmarked by the ministry for some activities had been re-distributed while some important areas in the sector had been excluded.
According to him, “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.”
The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Senator Lanre Tejuosho reasoned that given the submission of the minister, the budget before the committee was not the proposal of the Health Ministry.
While stating that it would be out of place to work on a budget that had already been disowned by the minister, he said, “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.”
Responding, Adewole said: “Yes, it’s not. We’ll submit the revised document tomorrow (today). It will be an updated version of what you have.”
He further explained 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, but is under the Presidency.
The minister, who observed that the figure might not have been the original allocation to the clinic by State House, disclosed that the original allocation might have been inflated by the same forces, which, he said, had distorted his ministry’s original estimates.
The Senate Committee Chairman consequently noted that since the minister said 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.
He added that it is the responsibility of the Special Duties’ Committee to engage the State House on the budget for the clinic.
The minister went on to dismiss the fears of Nigerians about Zika virus that is ravaging some countries, explaining that the virus had been in the country since 1954, but had been unable to harm citizens because Nigerians had developed strong resistance to it. He therefore stated that the virus should be ignored.
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