Health Minister Disowns Ministry’s Budget, Says “Rats” Have Doctored Proposal

Yesterday, the Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole shocked members of the Senate Committee on Health, when he informed the committee that the original budget of his ministry had been largely distorted. He claimed that strange figures were smuggled into the budget.

The budget proposal was submitted on behalf of Minister of Health, by the Ministry of Budget and National Planning. The minister’s revelation reinforced the Senate’s claim that the 2016 budget had been tampered with. The minister urged the committee to discard the budget proposal before it and await a new estimate to be re-submitted today.

He told the committee that there were some health issues on which conclusions had not been made by the ministry and yet allocations were made on them without the ministry’s knowledge. He said: “In the revised budget as re-submitted, N15.7 billion for capital allocation has been moved to other areas.

Some allocations made are not in keeping with our priorities. There is nothing allocated to public health and family health. Over the last two years, nothing has been done on HIV. We have to look into the details of the budget and re-submit it to the committee.

This was not what we submitted. We’ll submit another one. We don’t want anything foreign to creep into that budget. What we submitted is not there. We have not reached that stage and we find the money there.”