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“The civil service provides the continuity, the technocrat. And in any case, they are the people who do most of the work. The ministers are there, I think, to make a lot of noise, for the politicians to make a lot of noise. But the work is being done by the technocrats.
“I said we will have one by the end of the month, and time flies. The end of the month is coming too quickly for my liking. Yea, I will stick to it. I will send the names to the National Assembly.”
The above is an excerpt from an interview President Muhammadu Buhari famously granted to the media in far away, Paris, France on the 16th of September, 2015.
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RECENTLY, for the umpteenth time, the office of the Auditor-General of the Federation queried the Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government (MDAS) over malfeasance. As a matter of fact, such queries have become routine in the last few years when the MDAs have basked in mind-boggling corruption while the Muhammadu Buhari administration talks tough about cleaning up the system but does nothing concrete to address the bourgeoning rot. For instance, in a report being considered by the Senate Committee on Public Accounts, the Auditor General queried the Ministry of Petroleum Resources for printing awareness leaflets on the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) for the sum of N98.4 million without due process, and the committee also discovered that N39 million was paid into the accounts of two members of staff in the ministry for “project monitoring” within the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
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’Femi Asu
The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, has said asking oil companies to relocate to the Niger Delta without addressing the security concerns will only escalate Nigeria’s cost of crude oil production.
Sylva said this on Monday in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, at a special town hall meeting organised by the state government and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources with chiefs, youths and other stakeholders in the state, according to a statement by the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board.
Sylva expressed the Federal Government’s commitment to the development of Bayelsa and other states of the Niger Delta.
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Governor of Bayelsa State, Douye Diri, on Monday, joined traditional rulers, youths and other key stakeholders to demand a better presence of Federal Government in order to fast track overall development of the state.
The stakeholders made the call during a special town hall meeting organised by the Ministry of Petroleum Resources in conjunction with the state government at the Chief Harold Dappa Biriye Conference Centre in Yenagoa.
They called on the Federal Government to revisit the abandoned federal secretariat and housing projects among other federal infrastructure lacking in the state.
In their presentation, chairman of the Central Zone, Ijaw Youth Council, Clever Inodu, and the council’s spokesman, Ebilade Ekerefe, stressed that constructive engagement of the youths was vital to sustaining the peace and security in the Niger Delta.
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Before transmitting the 2021 budget to President Muhammadu Buhari, the National Assembly added several controversial projects, as well as increased and slashed the budget of some ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), a PREMIUM TIMES appraisal of the budget has shown.
The 2021 budget proposed by President Buhari to the lawmakers was N13.08 trillion. But upon passage, federal lawmakers used their legislative powers over the budget to up the bill to N13.6 trillion, an increment of over N500 billion.
By this increase, the legislators made the proposal larger than the actual estimates. They also inserted new, controversial projects to the budget, numbering over 1000.