The 2025 joint Senate and House of Representatives Committee on Refional Development on Tuesday at budget defence exposed how the House of Representatives Leader, Prof. Julius Ihonvere has allocated to himself projects worth over N2 billion.
Prof Ihonvbere who represents Owan West/East Federal Constituency of Edo State, reportedly cornered the larger chunk of the entire budgetary envelope of N24 billion capital projects for 2025.
The revelation was given by the Minister of Regional Development, Abubakar Momoh who appeared with his State counterpart, Uba Maigari.
Immediately the revelation began to generate anger among Senators and members of the House of Representatives, especially when it was noticed that there were lopsided allocation of projects with 70% domiciled in Edo State, the panel broke into closed door session to shut out journalists.
CAPITAL POST reports that during the presentation of the 2024 budget performance by the Minister, some lawmakers were uncomfortable, thereby raising curiosity of journalists. At that point, it was discovered that some lawmakers claimed to have been shortchanged as they were no releases for some of their own Constituency projects in 2024 by the Executive arm of government.
Lawmakers raised concerns over non adherence to federal character principles and lopsided nature of the budget which they said favoured Edo State over other states that were supposed to have benefitted from the projects.
Earlier after the Minister’s presentation of the 2024 budget performance of his ministry, a member representing Aboh Mbaise/Ngor Okpala Federal Constituency of Imo State
questioned the minister on why 70 per cent of the projects for 2024 were located in Edo State, suggesting unequalled distribution.
Nwogu said, “Mr minister, tell us why most of these 2024 budgets (projects) are situated in Edo State?”
The lawmaker expressed disappointment that other States within the defunct Niger Delta Development Commission were excluded while bulk of the projects went to Edo State.
In similar vein, Hon. Chinedu Ogar, also asked the minister to explain to the committee on why 70 percent of the 2025 proposed projects of the ministry are also located in Edo State, and vowed to reject the proposal.
As tempers began to rise, the House of Representatives Committee Chairman on Regional Development, Eugene Okechukwu, immediately attempted to calm nerves, and urged his colleagues to reserve their questions for a closed session.
Okechukwu said, “We have to be mindful at this point that we have the press men here among us. What we should do now is to go into an executive session, then we ask the press men to leave.”
Journalists were subsequently asked to leave while the committee dissolved into an executive session to interface with the minister on the matter.
Earlier, the minister in his presentation said the sum of N2 billion in the Ministry’s proposed budget for 2025 was reserved as zonal intervention (constituency) projects for the Leader of the House of Representatives, Prof Julius Ihonvbere.
The minister told the committee that the ministry’s total budget proposal for 2025 was N28.9 billion comprising N24 billion for capital projects; N2.7 billion for personnel cost and N1.6 billion for recurrent.
He, however said of the amount, a total sum of N2 billion was reserved as a zonal intervention projects for the Leader of the House of Representatives, Prof Julius Ihonvbere, who hails from Edo State.
The minister lamented that the amount earmarked for the Ministry of Regional Development to address the development needs of the five regional development commissions is inadequate.
He appealed to the joint committee to increase the budget of the ministry to enable it to address the development issues of the regions through the commissions.
The minister lamented that due to inadequate budgetary allocation, the ministry had been facing the challenges of litany of abandoned and uncompleted projects; delay in project completion and poor performance.
