Members of the House of Representatives
Committee on Electoral and Political Party Matters on Wednesday grilled
the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof.
Mahmoud Yakubu, and other top officials over the budget of the 2019
general elections.....
The INEC chairman was also grilled by the Senate Committee on INEC on the same budget.
INEC has proposed to spend a total of
N189.2bn to conduct the polls, covering presidential, National Assembly,
governorship and state assemblies elections.
The cost covers the aspects of the
elections to be handled directly by INEC. The overall cost of the
elections as presented to the National Assembly in July by President
Muhammadu Buhari is N242.4bn, including security operations.
Recall that the passage of elections
budget is the main reason members of the National Assembly, who are on
annual recess, have come under pressure lately to reconvene.
INEC met separately with the Senate and
House committees on electoral matters. The two panels will hold a joint
session to harmonize their findings and produce a report, setting the
stage for the reconvening of the legislature.
Yakubu appeared before the House
committee at the National Assembly in Abuja on Wednesday to defend the
commission’s component of the elections budget (N189.2bn).
The committee is chaired by a member of the All Progressives Congress from Gombe State, Mrs Aisha Dukku.
Yakubu said he responded to nearly 30 questions by lawmakers before he lost count of the questions.
The chairman, who arrived for the meeting with the House committee at 11.09am, left one hour and 30 minutes later.
A breakdown of the N189.2bn showed that
INEC would spend N134.4bn on election operational cost; N27.5bn on
procurement of election technologies; N22.6bn on administrative cost;
and another N4.6bn on miscellaneous expenditure.
Members queried the seeming
“duplication's” in the elections budget and the regular budget of INEC
already passed by the National Assembly for its 2018 operations.
No comments: