The Senate and House of Representatives joint Committee on Agricultural Production and Services on Thursday threatened zero allocation for agencies under the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, as Chief Executive Officers of the affected angencies failed to appear for the defence of their 2025 budgets.
Chairman of the Senate Committee, Senator Saliu Mustapha and his House of Representatives counterpart, Hon. Bello Kaoje on Thursday expressed disappointment over the development that in spite of the directive of President Bola Ahmed for all heads of agencies to appear before the National Assembly to defend their budget, some of them rather choose to travel
One of such was the Director General of the Nigerian Agricultural Quarantine Service Dr. Vincent Isegbe, as Senator Mustapha told the representative that there was no reason for the Chief Executive who is the accounting officer not to appear personally. “We are not going to attend to you. When the President came to present this budget, he made it clear that all heads of agencies must come to defend their estimates and should therefore call off any plan to travel.
“We are going to give him another time, but that may not be too convenient for him because we have a time frame to submit our report.
“We should all make this thing easy for ourselves. There is no need for us to drag what we don’t need to drag. Even if he is coming to take excuse, he should have been here to say these are the people that will do this thing on my behalf.
“At the end of the day, we will ask you certain questions and you will not be able to answer them. Are we supposed to be taking those kind of excuses? You may wish to excuse us and tell him that we are giving him 48 hours to report.
“The President made it very clear that nobody should travel when he came to present the budget and it is now that he will start traveling. So tell him that we are available tomorrow, and that’s the best we will give him to appear”, he said.
