The Minister of Women Affairs, Asisha Alhassan has blamed her inability to submit of breakdown of the ministry’s proposed budget defence to the House of Representatives on consistent power failure at the Federal Secretariat complex.
Alhassan who pleaded with the House Committee on Women Affairs and Social Development, the ministry’s secretariat sometimes experience black-out for three consecutive days.
“On behalf of the ministry, we sincerely apologise for not coming back to you or for not sending the documents when you requested for them. The challenge we had is that, sometimes the secretariat we stay for three, four, five weeks without light; right now, this is the third week that we have stayed without light. The Permanent Secretary and I had to raise money personally to buy diesel at the Women Centre to do it; at the time, there was no light in the ministry, we could not retrieve data from the desk top computers,” she said.
The minister added that she had given directives that all document in the ministry be transferred to an external hard-drive for easy external printing as the secretariat .
Chairman of the committee, Hon. Stella Uchenna expressed with the development said committee had written to the ministry and had given enough time to enable the ministry make the necessary submissions.
“On the 30th, January 2017, we request that you send to us the budget implementation of 2016, the document did not reach us, then on February 9, we wrote a reminder, we did not get a reply, because we are short of time, we now wrote requesting for budget performance for 2016 and the proposal for 2017,” she said.
Source: Leadership
