Nigeria’s House of Representatives committee on National Population Commission, NPC, has rejected the 2022 budget of the Commission until a detailed report of how its 2021 budget was expended is presented.
The committee’s resolution followed the inability of the Commission to explain how it spent the sum of 1.9 billion naira on a National summit.
Lawmakers picked holes in the report presented by the commission asking it to give a comprehensive analysis of how it spent 118 million naira on designing a website, over 5 billion naira for mock census, and 23 million naira for welfare packages.
Director of Census, Evelyn Olanipekun in her presentation stated that out of the 1.9 billion naira it spent on the summit, over 129 million naira was expended on a one day summit organized at the presidential villa while 1.2 billion was used to organize another round of summits across 36 states of the Federation but findings by the committee showed that the summit is yet to hold in some states.
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Representative of the Chairman, Bala Banye declined to answer the lawmakers questions saying details of how the budget was expended has been documented in their report to the committee.
The committee asked the National Population Commission to make available all documents in relation to the summit a day before its next scheduled date.
Editor : Ena Agbanoma