The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Economy, Wale Edun, and his counterpart in Budget, Senator Abubakar Bagudu have been summoned by the National Assembly over paltry allocation to the Solid Minerals Sector in the 2025 Budget.
Their summon to appear before the joint Committee- Senate and House of Representatives on Tuesday was to give further clarification on concerns about inadequate funding of the Solid Minerals sector considered to be critical to diversification of the nation’s economy.
The Joint Committee added that the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Mr. Tanimu Yakubu, should also appear before it.
The committee, jointly chaired by Sen. Ekong Samson and Hon Gaza Jonathan, spoke after the Minister of Solid Minerals, Mr Dele Alake, appeared before the lawmakers on Monday to express the frustrations he had faced fighting hard to increase the budgetary allocations to the ministry without success.
Alake lamented how Nigeria continued to get things wrong by leaving the development of solid minerals behind in revenue generation, stressing that his frantic effort could only get N5 billion envelope.
“In fact, to let you know, the envelope we first received was N5 billion. I don’t know if you are aware of that. It was N5 billion” ,he informed the members.
Alake disclosed that when he stepped up mounting pressure on the ministers and the DG budget after President Bola Tinubu presented the estimates to the National Assembly, he was reassured that the allocation would be increased substantially only to just N9bn.
“The Permanent Secretary is here and the night before the president came here, when we were working on the rehearsal of the budget speech, the Director of Budget came in and the Minister of Budget and I took them up in the presence of the President.
“And what did they do? They promised that it would be done. So, again the following day, after the President’s presentation, we found N9billion”, he stated.
“There is no way that I can begin to tell you, except I have videos that I can show you of the several engagements that we had with the relevant budgetary authorities and individuals driving this process and at every turn we received very positive responses,” he stated.