The Minister for Niger Delta Affairs, Elder Godsday Orubebe was summoned by the joint committees on Downstream, Niger Delta Ministry and Local Governments in the House of Representatives yesterday to explain his ministry’s role in the Federal Government’s Subsidy Re-investment Empowerment Programme, SURE-P.
The Joint Committee also insisted that governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Mallam Sanusi Lamido, must appear next Tuesday, despite the fact that he had appealed earlier that he would be unavoidably absent.
Dakuku Peterside, Chairman of the Joint Committee on Subsidy Re-Investment and Empowerment Programme, SURE-P, made this disclosure at a meeting with stakeholders while assuring Nigerians that the National Assembly’s inquest into the activities of the agency would be guided by national interest.
Peterside, nonetheless, identified some troubling issues around SURE-P that had dominated public discourse for a considerable number of months now.
He said: “They include the agency’s inconsistent status with the President’s objectives at the inception of the programme, the perceived duplication of normal activities of ministries, the belief that SURE-P is a political tool in the hands of a certain interest groups.
”The perception that the agency has done little or nothing to create jobs, protect the vulnerable and engender the much needed economic transformation of Nigeria.”
Also present were the Minister of Works, Mike Onolememen, and Minister of State for Health,Muhammad Ali Pate, who spoke extensively on their challenges and constraints in the implementation of programmes in their ministries.
The meeting provided fresh insight on the activities of the befitting ministries and agencies.
It was discovered that most of the projects awarded by the Ministry of Works were awarded without due process and projects were fragmented and had the order of the day, a trend both the joint committee and the Ministry agreed served nobody’s interest and must, therefore, be addressed in the interest of the people.
On his own part, Pate agreed that many people did not trust government because of experiences of the past. He explained that SURE-P was meant to help regain peoples’ confidence in government.
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