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The Chairman, Subsidy Reinvestment Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), General Luther Martins Agwai (rtd), yesterday said about N280 billion out of the N360 billion allocated to some social infrastructure in the country was spent, while about N80 billion was rolled over from the period under review.
Agwai led his team to the Presidential Villa to brief President Goodluck Jonathan on the progress made by the agency since it came on board two years ago.
He said the agency had recorded a lot of progress in critical infrastructure in various parts of the country, especially in road, railway and health sectors.
According to the SURE-P chairman, over of N90 billion was rolled over last year, because when the programme started, nothing substantial could be achieved and as such, management had to roll over N90 billion, “which we could not utilise because we started late. Besides, in 2013, we had over N88N which we rolled over into 2014.
“Our policy this year is that we should have zero budget roll over by us. We have already set up the machinery and we are working and have restructured our operation into sub committees. We have worked on the lesions learned in the past two years and we are in top gear to deliver and I want to assure Nigerians that in this year, they will see remarkable change and we will deliver these services with integrity and credibility.
“Sure-P has achieved a lot in this country. You just have to go out there and see the facts which are very closed to us including the Abuja Lokoja road. If you know how that road was before we came in, in 2012 and you know how it is now, we hope that by the end of this year, we will now know how much we have done. If you go to the area of maternal health, we have been able to upgrade five hundred centers and we are working now on another 700 health centres.
“We have sank over 620 boreholes to give our mothers good health, good pipe born water and we are also providing health medications and Mama kits for expectant mothers. From the reports we have had on the contributions of SURE P, Maternal Health Care (MCH), under SURE P, we have been able to reduce by almost 60 per cent the number of death due to child births. Now we have over half a million women giving birth under professionally organized midwives which was not the case in the past” Agwai said
On the involvement of National Assembly, he said: “We are working for Nigerians and the lawmakers are Nigerians. We went to inspect Eweto bridge with members of the National Assembly, we invited them and they came with us. We have nothing to hide.
They are representing Nigerians and we are working for Nigeria. We have also asked Nigerians if there are areas they found that there are challenges or more information for us to intervene or to perform better in, they should come forward to tell us. We are very open and our objective is to serve Nigeria.
Also, a member of the board and immediate past Director-General of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), Mazi Sam Ohabunwa said “It is important to know that in two years of our existence, we have spent less than N300B. Out of the N360billion that was allocated to us, we rolled over N80billion so we spent about N280billion. That what we used to get the east west road to where it is, the rail line running from Kano to Lagos, and all the works that have been done. So you can imagine if the over N1 trillion that was spent on subsidy is released for this kind of work. Nigeria will get the best of services.”
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