Lagos-Calabar rail project: Ashafa's shocking revelation!

Ashafa

The speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has taken on Twitter users over allegation that the National Assembly removed the proposed Lagos-Calabar rail modernisation project from the 2016 appropriation bill.

Twitting on the issue, the Speaker described the report as “barefaced lies”. He said there was no provision for the project on the budget, calling on those with contrary information to come up with evidence.

Reports of the project removal flooded the Internet on Sunday, triggering a widespread controversy. Many social media users blamed the lawmakers for allegedly replacing it with their constituency projects.     

Dogara, a conservative social media user, had earlier abstained from the online debate. He, however, delved into it in the early hours of Monday, making use of his Twitter page to give his position.

Social media activists had demanded an explanation from the Speaker on the decision to delete the project from the budget.  For instance, tweeting on @demola_ade77, one Alabi Ojo called on him to explain why the key infrastructure would not receive a deserved priority.

Responding to Ojo and others, Dogara said Nigerians had failed to ask the right questions. The masses, he said, should have asked whether the project was included in the expenditure template before attacking NASS on social media.

To a tweeter, who challenged the Speaker to publish the presentation of the Minister of Transport, Chibuike Amaechi, during the budget defence session, Dogara said, “Ameachi does not have any constitutional power to prepare a budget estimate and lay the same before NASS.”

According to him, those who claim the parliament removed or substituted the rail project may have got their information from the beer parlour.

The number four citizen in the country asked, “Who in the Presidency said so? The presidential spokesman or the Minister of Information?

“I guess (this is) from the beer parlour, as any reasonable man claiming so should have given hard evidence.”

He said the misinformation had nothing to do with the Presidency, but an intentional lie “meant to stir hatred.”                      

Dogara is not alone in employing digital tools to defend NASS against the allegation.  The Chairman, the House Committee on Appropriation, Abdulmumin Jibrin, has been on Twitter since Sunday, for the same reason.

In a series of tweets, Jibrin said, “The Lagos-Calabar rail was never captured in the budget that transmitted to NASS. How then did the NASS remove it? I actually find it shocking that even some national dailies made the removal their headlines. A little research would have helped.

“All they, those spreading the false information, needed to have done were to check the initial document sent by the executive… The Ministry of Transportation overshot its budget by N54bn. That is, by the time you add up the items on the ministry’s budget, you would still have a gap of N54bn. N54bn lying there without being allocated.”

Yet, Jibrin pointed out that the constitution gave lawmakers powers to re-allocate, remove, add or increase items on the appropriation. 

“The constitution is explicitly clear. The role of the President in the preparation of budget is to send estimates while NASS has powers to allocate, re-allocate, remove, add, increase, reduce or retain revenue and expenditure item.”

Senators Godwill Akpabio, Ben Murray-Bruce and other lawmakers from the South-South have been singled out for an online attack over the issue.

Murray-Bruce said, “The only reason behind the lie… is to set Nigerians against each other.”

Interestingly, the post by Chairman of the Senate Committee on Land Transport, Gbenga Ashafa, may have contradicted the position of other lawmakers. Posting on his Facebook wall on Monday, he said the project was not in the original document but that it was included in the supplementary copy Amaechi sent during ministerial budget defence.

He noted, “Amaechi did inform the committee of the omission of the Lagos-Calabar rail modernisation and indeed sent a supplementary copy of the ministry’s budget to the committee, which contained the said project.

“The minister noted that the amount needed for the counterpart funding for both the Lagos to Kano and Lagos to Calabar rail modernisation projects was in the sum of N120bn, being N60bn each. While the committee did not completely agree with all the changes made in the subsequent document, we keyed into the laudable rail modernisation project and found ways of appropriating funds for it without exceeding the envelope provided for the ministry.”

He said the disputed project was included in the document his committee sent to the Senate Committee on Appropriation, adding that the unallocated N54bn reportedly found in the Ministry of Transport’s budget was for Lagos-Kano and Lagos-Calabar rail projects.