Senior federal government officials have for one year now refused to disclose to the House of Representatives how billions of naira Ecological Fund is spent, Members heard during Plenary yesterday.Rep. Uche Ekunife, chairman committee on Enviroment said her committee has made several efforts to get the statement of accounts of the ecological fund from office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) to no avail.She added, 'for over one year the AGF has refused to make available statement of accounts of the ecological fund. It is being operated illegally as it is solely at the discretion of the President to release it.'Speaker House of Representatives Aminu Waziri Tambuwal described as 'mystery fund' the Ecological Fund which is meant to tackle ecological disaster in Nigeria.She said her committee was sponsoring a bill that will create the ecological fund agency in accordance with the financial Act.Ekunife blamed President Goodluck Jonathan for the menace of flood in Nigeria because he has refused to give assent to the Climate Change Commission passed by the last Assembly which would have minimised havoc of the current floods in the country.The House requested the President to forward a supplementary appropriation bill within the shortest possible time to help tackle the menace of flooding across the country.{loadposition user30}The request followed a motion on matters of urgent public importance sponsored by Rep. Umar Buba Jibrin (CPC, Kogi) and two others.The Fund which originally received 1 per cent of the Federation Account was reviewed upwards to 2 per cent of the Federation Account in 1992 on the first line charge.Daily Trust recent exclusive report showed thatSeveral states that are prone to desertification have lost out in the provision' of the 2011 ecological projects, while the President hometown received the largest share of the allocation.Official documents obtained by Daily Trust show that of the N41.9 billion the Federal Government earmarked for ecological projects in 2011, Otuoke, the president's hometown, emerged as the biggest beneficiary with a project worth about N5 billion.However, ten northern states, most of which are prone to desertification, did not get a single ecological project for that period.The northern states left out are Zamfara, Jigawa, Katsina, Yobe, Borno, Kebbi, Gombe, Kwara, Kogi and Nasarawa, the documents reveal.Some states in the south that did not benefit from any project during the period include Lagos, Oyo, Osun, Rivers and Edo States.Officials at the Ecological Fund Office in the Presidency, however, insisted that the states left out had benefitted in previous ecological funding and that the current system of allocation is based on 'requests that emanate from the states'.It is a constitutional provision that one per cent of the federally accrued revenue be set aside for tackling ecological challenges that include desertification, drought and soil erosion, among others.N5bn for Jonathan's hometown Documents from the Ecological Fund Office, however, show that the allocation for projects commencing from June 2011 to July 2012 is lopsided in favour of south-eastern states and the president's hometown of Otuoke in Bayelsa State which gets the biggest project.The Bayelsa project was for the reclamation works at the site of the Federal University, Utuoke, awarded at the cost of N4.997 billion. It was awarded in July last year with a completion time of seven months, one of the documents shows.Further analysis of the document, which contains details of all the projects awarded, shows that of the N41.9 billion that went to the ecology account, the Federal Government only awarded contracts totalling about N19.5 billion from June to October 2011 and released only N3.5 billion to the contractors by that time.The document also indicates that the second biggest project was located in Kaduna State, Vice President Namadi Sambo's home state. It was for the work on sludge pits at the Kaduna Refinery Petroleum Chemical Company in Rido community, awarded at the cost of N1.8 billion.However, the document shows that no single kobo was released for it up to the end of the second quarter of this year, even though it was awarded in December last year and was planned to be completed last month.The state also got another project, Zaria Erosion Control, awarded in September 2011 at the cost of N31.96 million, and was expected to be completed last July.In terms of quantity of projects, Anambra tops the list with five projects on erosion control, dredging and flood control, awarded at the total cost of N3.5 billion. Imo too had five projects at N1.6 billion.Abia State follows with four projects at the cost of N1.8 billion, Enugu had three projects at the cost of N2.6 billion, Akwa Ibom had two at N386 million and so had Ogun at N173 million.Ebonyi State got N1.5 billion project for the channelisation of Iyi Okwu and Iyiudele stream in Abakaliki.Other states that had at least one project are Benue (worth N111 million), Sokoto (N94 million), Taraba (N293 million), Adamawa (N129 million), Niger (N70 million), Ekiti (N198 million), Bauchi (N319 million), Cross River (N146 million), Kano (N72 million) and Plateau (N106 million).The ten northern states left out are among those with severest ecological problems in the country, experts said.Dr Abba Kagu, a lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Maiduguri, had recently noted that drought and desertification remain the major environmental problems affecting most parts of the northern states, which according to him, are responsible for the loss of about 351,000 square kilometres of the nation's land mass.
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