The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, said there were numerous uncompleted roads across the country because budget implementation was tied to numerous projects.
Speaking at the budget defence session organised by the Senate Committee on Local and Foreign Debt, she said: “Once fund is released and the money is finished, the contractor stops work, and after two years, the contractor comes back and asks for variation, and the amount just keeps growing. That’s the consequence of these numerous projects that we put in the budget.”
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She said the current Sukuk fund of N162bn was tied to 45 road projects cutting across the six geopolitical zones, noting that the decision was not the best for the country.
She said: “I’m one person that feels that we should just do this and take one major road in one geopolitical zone and finish.
“We’re not able to do that because of the processes in which appropriation is made both at the executive as well as the legislative arms of government.
“But truly, if we’re able to just take one or two projects at a time and complete it before going to the next one, it’ll be better.
“I wish that we get to a point when we sit down as government and agree that let us select a few projects, finish them in 2020, and then in 2021, we select the next. So that on a geopolitical basis, those selections are done as a collective process.”
On the delay in releasing Sukuk fund to contractors for executed projects, she said though the fund was protected, there were procedures put in place to verify claims that would be paid.
“The first batch which is about N58bn has been released. There’s another N35bn under processing,” she added.
