The Senate has said it will ask the executive to explain why it gave the capital expenditure of the National Hajj Commission of Nigeria zero allocation in the 2016 budget.
The Senate Committee on Federal Character and Inter-Governmental Affairs, during an oversight visit to NAHCON’s office in Abuja on Monday, said it would probe into the matter and address the concerns expressed by the leadership of commission.
Speaking during the visit, the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi, said the panel would immediately write to the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation to ask why NAHCON’s capital projects were not funded.
Earlier, the Chairman of NAHCON, Abdullahi Mukhtar, while giving highlights of the budget performance of the commission, decried that no funds were appropriated for capital expenditure in 2016, Punch reports.
He said, “The present challenge facing the commission at present is office accommodation. As of today, the present office being occupied by the commission’s head office is a rented apartment and funding of the rent, along with the zonal offices’ rent, is not being adequately provided for in the overhead appropriation. Proposal for construction of commission’s permanent site in Abuja was not captured in 2016 appropriation act.”
He added that out of N617,524,914 appropriated for overhead cost, only the sum of N91,348,017 had released, leaving a balance of N526,176,896.
Mukhtar told the committee that all attempts to make the Ministry of Finance allocate funds for the capital projects of the commission failed.
The NAHCON boss, who disclosed that the commission had proposed N500m for capital expenditure in the 2016 budget, said there was a mix-up, which led to said sum being shifted to NAHCON’s offshore expenditure profile.
The development, he noted, made it impossible for the funds to be accessed, a position which the Budget Office stated was beyond its powers to revisit.
