I Cannot Be Interrogated For Budget Padding – Dogara

Yakubu Dogara, Speaker of the House of Representatives on Thursday gave basis why he cannot surrender himself to be interrogated by the Police Special Investigating Panel over alleged padding of the 2016 budget.

“I am protected by a statutory protection under the Legislative House Powers & Privileges Act”, he said in Abuja.

The Honorable, who was speaking at an interactive session with Civil Society Organizations, CSOs, in Abuja, on one-year review of the 8th House of Representatives Legislative Agenda, said he enjoys statutory protection under the Legislative Houses Powers & Privileges Act.

In his words, “most of the things we do in the National Assembly are privileged”. legislative business of the House cannot be grounds for any investigation or any procedure or proceeding to be commenced in court against a member of parliament, either the Speaker or even the Senate President, once they are done in exercise of their proper function”.

“The law is there, both communications and written, they are privileged. That is in order to give independence to the legislature. If the legislature is not independent we can’t do anything. If whatever you say on the floor or before a committee or whatever you communicate is subject of litigation then all the members will be in court and at the end of the day when debate come you cannot even air your views”.

“If you talk about the Lagos-Calabar rail line, by the time we took the budget there was no provision for it, even though the Minister claimed that he appeared and tried to defend the thing, it took the intervention of the National Assembly to raise N60billion for the Lagos-Calabar rail line. So if they claim that there is anything known as padding, which I have always wondered what padding is, then the president, minister and National Assembly were the one that padded it”. So who would be held responsible?

“When it comes to national budget, who actually sits down to say these are the projects we will fund? Is the process open? Is it transparent? Are the people responsible for doing this accountable to anyone other than you just find these projects littered in the budget. The answer is No! “But some people sit in the budget office, I want to challenge the civil society to just take the budget of a particular Ministry for instance and look at where the Directors and some of the key officials, I don’t even want to mention their names, just look at where they come from and then look at the allocation for that Ministry”.

“For anyone who understands legislative process to begin to say that four people sat down and padded the budget, if it were in the US, we refer to such person as a BS artist. If you don’t know what BS artist is, go and Google it”.