Ndubuisi Francis in Abuja
The Fiscal Responsibility Commission (FRC) will on Monday begin physical verification of select federal government capital projects across the six geo-political zones of the country.
The projects earmarked for the physical verification are those in the South-East, South-West, South-South, North-Central, North-East and North-West geo-political zones of the country. The value of the projects to be verified in the six geo-political zones is N2.9 trillion.
FRC Chairman, Victor Muruako, enjoined the staff who will be going out for the exercise to carry out the assignments with great diligence and a sense of purpose, adding that the exercise is one of the core mandates of the commission.
A statement issued by the FRC Head, Strategic Communication Directorate,
Bede Ogueri Anyanwu said Muruako urged the team to ensure the actual existence of the projects as well as monitor the progress of work done so far.
The verification exercise, he added, is further designed to give a fillip to the next level agenda of President Bola Tinubu’s renewed Hope Agenda in the area of prudence, value-for-money and transparency.
The effort is to meet the yearnings of the people, he stressed, noting that the verification must also be done within the ambit of the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF).
Muruako directed all the verification teams to submit the results of their reports as they come back to enable the Commission to send the same to the appropriate government agencies for further action.
The statement explained that the reason for the verification exercise was to ensure that the government embarks on projects that it can fund, adding that with MTEF, cases of abandoned projects will cease to exist.
Section 18 (1) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), 2007 said: “The Medium Term Expenditure Framework shall be the basis for the preparation of the estimates of revenue and expenditure required to be prepared and laid before the National Assembly under Section 81(1) of the Constitution”.
According to the Act: “The Medium-Term Expenditure Framework shall contain:
A Macro-Economic Framework setting out the macroeconomic projections, for the next three financial years, the underlying assumptions for those projections and an evaluation and analysis of the macroeconomic projections and an evaluation and analysis of the macroeconomic projections for the preceding three financial years.”
The verification exercise is also to determine projects that need funding in line with the completion targets and to reduce to the barest minimum, approvals for new capital projects for Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) where the existing indebtedness to contractors is in billions of naira and ensure there is value for money.
