SURE Vows To Implement Programme

The Chairman, Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment (SURE) Committee, Dr Christopher Kolade, has said that the on-going subsidy probe by the National Assembly would not impede the coommittee’s work.

Kolade stated this in an interview with the State House Correspondents after a closed-door meeting of members of the committee with President Goodluck Jonathan at the State House, Abuja.

He said the mandate of the committee was to manage the funds saved from subsidy removal and use it to prosecute certain projects.

Kolade said its mandate was distinct from the allegation of mismanagement of the subsidy regime.

The SURE chairman noted that members of the committee were at the State House to present their first report to the president and brief him on how far they had gone.

“All we’ve done today is to tell the President how we are organising the work, how we are working with the other parts of the public service which are handling the projects.

“And we’ve done that so that he knows what is going on and as you could see, not just ourselves, some ministers were also there.

“So everybody now knows how far we’ve gone and they have been able to tell us what they think about what we have done so far.

“So, we are going back to build on that and to try to implement going forward.’’

Kolade added that the committee had redesigned its programme based on the funds made available to it and that it was receiving maximum support from relevant government agencies, pointing out that the committee had completed all the needed preliminary work and ready to go to implementation stage to speed up its job.

It would be recalled that the president inaugurated the committee in February to ensure the effective and timely implementation of projects to be funded with the savings accruing to the Federal Government from subsidy removal.

The committee was originally mandated to utilise at least N480 billion Federal Government’s shares of the accruals from the total deregulation of the petroleum downstream sector, and with the partial deregulation regime, however, the Federal Government share of the subsidy fund was reduced to N180 billion.

The N180 billion was separately captured in the 2012 budget as assented to by the President on April 13 for implementation of projects captured under the SURE programme.