Bankole blames civil servants for budget woes

Tuesday’s debate in the House of Representatives which considered President Umar Yar’adua’s fiscal plan pushed Speaker Dimeji Bankole back to controversy, accusing the civil service for the nation’s budget woes and arguing with a colleague on whether the word “opprobrium” is in the dictionary.

Mr. Bankole accused the civil service of failing to implement the yearly budgets as passed and also of not remitting over N1 trillion internally generated revenue.

“Now it is obvious that the civil service is the problem; what do we do about it?” he asked.

“The question of the input is sorted out, the problem is the output.” The Speaker said over N500 billion of the releases the ministries, departments and agencies got are still with the Central Bank, therefore the “problem is no longer with elected officials, but with the civil service, the engine room of development.”

No remittance

He also said the ministries, departments and agencies do not make remittances or account to anyone whatever the amount they realize from internally generated revenues which may be in trillions of naira.

“The civil servants themselves gave us this figure between N750 billion and N1trillion unremitted funds,” he said. “If we investigate, we will find out that those figures are conservative.” This brought Mr. Bankole’s remark in tune with his earlier comment which accused the civil service of grave corruption.

The Speaker later retracted his comments after the former Head of Service, Amma Pepple, protested.

He also raised the issue of the military being mobilized for the Ekiti state re-run elections early this year. Again when the remark kicked up dust, the Speaker said he was misquoted.

Ehiogie West- Idahosa, one of the longest serving members from Edo state, made submissions that criticized the executive’s proposal and in a way, reflected Mr. Bankole’s failings to stand against past misadventures of the executive.

“When are we going to rise up to our responsibilities of standing up against the executive?” he had asked. “Thank God, you are young and dynamic.” When the Speaker asked the House: “Are you ready for this”, his colleagues asked in turn. “Is the leadership ready?”

But the Speaker concluded that “gone are those days when any unit of government will use their issues to smack the heads of the executive and the legislature together. It is not happening again,” he told them.

“Opprobrium”

His earlier reaction was when Dino Melaye used the word in his criticisms of Mr. Yar’adua’s three-year medium term plan which many members also gave knocks to.

“At a time of opprobrium and ---, we are having this kind of proposal,” Mr. Melaye said, referring to the executive’s document.

The Speaker said he had not heard of “opprobrium” before and it certainly can not be an English word. He got the support of Ita Enang, who too said the word was Mr. Melaye’s coinage.

“Excuse me Honourable Melaye,” Mr. Bankole said. “Is that English and can you spell it?” “Yes, Mr. Speaker O-P---,” he went on to make the spelling while Mr. Bankole mandated the Chairman, Business and Rules, Ita Enang and the Clerk of the House to prove whether the word exists in the dictionary.

Mr. Enang replied promptly in the negative before the Clerk produced a dictionary that confirmed that Mr. Melaye was right. Mr. Enang apologized for “misleading the speaker.”