Governance
Fashola Seeks Provision For Contingency Fund In Budgets
- Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), Minister of Works and Housing under President Muhammadu Buhari has called for the provision of a contingency fund in Nigeria’s budget to cater for emergency situations.
EkohotBlog reports that Fashola expressed this after the Federal Executive Council meeting (FEC) on Wednesday. He said to journalists that the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) notified the public that a section of the Lokoja-Kabba federal highway had collapsed, urging motorists to avoid traveling through the road, specifically people traveling from southwest Nigeria.
The Minister while speaking further on the Lokoja-Kabba road cave-in, lamented that the ministry he supervises was often unable to respond to such conditions due to lack of “resources”. He suggested that a contingency fund should be set aside for such a purpose.
Fashola said to journalists that “So we’ve been proposing that Nigeria should have an emergency provision in the works budget, but we haven’t been successful enough.
“There must be a contingency, a sizable sum, because when we see failures, last year, we had a problem like that in Kebbi, where roads were washed away.
“We couldn’t respond because we didn’t have the resources. But we will lean on the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA).”
“We’re already talking to FERMA, we are seeing resources that we can deploy. We’re also talking to contractors in the area who we have contracts with, what stabilization and remedial efforts we will make there because we’re diverting traffic to alternate roads.
“Well, traditionally back in Lagos when I was governor, I think we used to provide about five 5% of our capital expenditure as a contingency fund for emergencies. Something between three and five percent varies across the world.”
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