Says era of carrot over, summons Okonjo-IwealaTHE frosty relationship between the legislative and the executive arms of government over poor implementation of budget came to the fore again yesterday, as the Senate expressed displeasure over assessed tardy execution of the 2012 economic plan.The House of Representatives had earlier put the level of budget performance at 39 per cent, which prompted its clamour for President Jonathan's impeachment.But the Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala reacted, claiming that the budget performance for the year had hit 56 per cent.After what was meant to be an interactive session between the Senate and Okonjo-Iweala, over 2012 budget failed to hold, Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, who represented the Senate President, Senator David Mark, described the situation as unacceptable and warned that the upper house would not hesitate to invoke the relevant sections of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) if steps were not taken to address the situation.Ekweremadu recalled that when the 2012 budget was presented to the National Assembly as a draft bill, only minimal input was made to ensure it was fully implemented.'We in the National Assembly decided that we are going to do everything possible to send the budget back to the executive the way it came, so that there would be no argument of whether it would be implemented or not. This is because over the years, we have had this issue of non-implementation of budget and the reason they usually give surrounds the area of National Assembly input. So, we decided we are going to make minimal input if anything at all.'So, on the basis of this, we returned the budget basically the way it came. And even when we criticized some areas of which some adjustments needed to be made, we had to bend at the risk of being accused of tampering with the budget so as to ensure that they received the budget the way they wanted so that implementation would be easier'', he said.Ekweremadu regretted that despite of their efforts, the level of implementation has remained low. 'Unfortunately, the level of implementation has been less than commendable and that is why we are worried.'He also refuted allegations credited to the Finance Minister, blaming the poor implementation of the budget on tinkering by the National Assembly.The absence of Okonjo-Iweala angered Ekweremadu as he mandated the Chairman of Appropriations Committee, Ahmed Maccido to summon her to appear before the Joint Committee on Finance and Appropriations tomorrow.'That is supposed to be the subject matter of this gathering. It is not a family meeting. It is a very serious business. Now we expected the Coordinating Minister and Minister of Finance to be here today because she is central to all that we were going to discuss.'As our chairman of the Committee on Appropriation has mentioned, this matter was supposed to be discussed last week Thursday, but the Minister was unavoidably absent and we learnt she went to Asaba to declare open the SURE-P programme and we consider our meeting with her on the issue that has to do with budget implementation to be more important than any other assignment.'Today (Tuesday), we have also been told she has gone to London to represent the President at an investment forum, which we know there are other Ministers and government officials that could have gone and done that to enable her to be here with us this afternoon. So it is regrettable that she is not here'', he said.Noting that it was impossible to continue without the Minister, Ekweremadu adjourned the hearing pending when she would be available but stressed that the lawmakers would no longer use carrot approach.'I have discussed with my colleagues and what we are going to do now is to allow our committee on Appropriation to look for an appropriate date, possibly by Thursday, and ensure that the Minister comes even if it means summoning her to ensure that she appears before the committee to tell Nigerians the degree of releases and of course, for the Secretary to the Government of the Federation to tell Nigerians the degree of utilization, because it is not just enough that releases were made, but we want to see the releases and then utilisation.'We want to see a situation where those releases and utilisation are impacting on the lives of Nigerians. We want to see roads being worked on; we want to see the water projects going on. We want to see the electricity projects. We appropriated about N900 billion for the security situation in the country.
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