Posted by By JAMES OJO, Abuja on
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Power and Energy, Dr. Aliyu Abdulahi, revealed on Thursday that all the 304 projects of the Nigeria Independent Power Projects (NIPP) designed to improve power supply by the Obasanjo administration were awarded by former Ministers of Power, Senator Liyel Imoke and Abdulahi Ahmeed.
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Power and Energy, Dr. Aliyu Abdulahi, revealed on Thursday that all the 304 projects of the Nigeria Independent Power Projects (NIPP) designed to improve power supply by the Obasanjo administration were awarded by former Ministers of Power, Senator Liyel Imoke and Abdulahi Ahmeed.
Giving testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Power and Energy probing the $16 billion spent on power reforms from 1999 to 2007, Abdulahi said that all the contracts were initiated from the office of the minister to the Due Process Office without any input from the ministry.
As a result of the level of involvement of Senator Imoke in the NIPP scheme, the committee has summoned him and former Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to appear today.
The panel was informed by the permanent secretary that not a single director in the Ministry of Power has any knowledge of the contracts awarded under the NIPP project, since 2004.
'No NIPP projects passed through the office of the permanent secretary by the records that I met when I came to the Ministry. All NIPP projects started from the office of the minister and passed to the Due Process Office," he said.
He had earlier told the committee that over 300 contracts were awarded under the NIPP scheme, while 304 payments have been made to contractors after clearance by a presidential committee.
Abdulahi said what he met on ground was the practice whereby the managing director of NIPP reports directly to the minister, adding that he rejected such arrangement the moment he resumed duty in the ministry, adding that he had to ignore the advice of the NIPP and insisted that the rule of public service must be obeyed.
'It was when I insisted that NIPP managing director must report to me that a director in the ministry was appointed to coordinate the activities of NIPP," the permanent secretary said.
He admitted that though the Presidency issued circulars and directives on how NIPP should be run from inception, there was no time any permanent secretary in the ministry was involved in the operations of NIPP.
On what the ministry was doing to tackle the problems of power in the country, the permanent secretary said that a task force had been set up to visit all projects sites, adding that the stand of the ministry on NIPP scheme would be based on the findings of the task force.
Explaining how NIPP was run under the Obasanjo government, James Olotu, chief executive officer of Niger Delta Power Holding Company, stated that a steering committee, under the supervision of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar determined the scope of contracts, while another steering committee headed by Senator Imoke, now governor of Cross River State, gave the final recommendation to the Federal Executive Council for approval.
Olutu, at the podium with the report of assessment of the contractors and consultants of all NIPP projects, faulted claims by Pivot Engineering, handling transmission lines in Benin, Asaba and Agbor, as well as Egergo Nigeria Limited, a company owned by former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar.
David Bray, the South African managing director of Pivot, had difficult moments to justify the money collected for the three projects without a corresponding work on ground.
It was established by the committee and Olotu that there was nothing going on at the site of the Benin , Agbor and Asaba location of the transmission lines.
Even then, Pivot had been paid N3,689,840,531.87k out of the total contract sum of N4,461,440,910.51k.
Chairman of the committee, Hon Ndudi Elumelu, expressed anger that Pivot collected such an amount with nothing on site, adding that three members of the committee came from the constituencies that would have benefited from the project.
In the case of Energo, which won the construction of transmission lines from New Haven, Enugu to Ikopt Ekpene, in Cross River State, the committee frowned that there was no record of registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) for a company that had collected, as at March 2008, the sum of N13billion out of N19bilion, leaving a balance of N6billion for a project to be completed by March 2009.
The anger of the committee was fueled by the claims of the consultant to the project, Colenco, represented by Thomas Lambert, who said that he was yet to visit the site of the project, though N501,348,252 had been collected from N720,159,940, being the contract sum.