House Of Reps Pledges Adequate Funding For North East

The House of Representatives Committee on the North East Development Commission (NEDC), yesterday pledged adequate budgetary allocation to the commission to tackle humanitarian challenges in the region.
The Chairperson of the Committee, Khadija Bukar-Abba, made the pledge in Maiduguri during a two-day oversight tour of the NEDC’s activities.
Bukar-Abba said that the committee had taken note of challenges facing the people of the Northeast zone.
She said that given the quantum of work that needed to be done, it became imperative that the commission should be provided with more funding to enable it effectively carry out its mandate.
The chairperson said the committee had gone round some of the projects being prosecuted by the commission in displaced communities and IDP camps, noting that a lot of people needed life-saving assistance.
“We have visited some of the IDP camps and had a firsthand experience of the depth of suffering people are going through, especially the women and children.
“We have also seen the impressive works that the NEDC has achieved in such a short period of a year since it began operation.
“But we have observed how overwhelming the work that the NEDC needed to do has been, and how their progress may be affected due to lack of resources.
“We visited Ngwom village in Mafa Local Government, about 18km outside of Maiduguri, and we have seen the 1,000 housing projects that the NEDC has embarked on; we are excited that the project would be concluded before the end of 2020.
“At the IDP camps, we have seen many women and children, and old persons who needed food more than anything else to survive, and we felt the challenges are overwhelming and the NEDC is underfunded,’’ she said.
Bukar-Abba commended the commission for achieving so much in the last one year, noting that rather than being accused of misappropriation of funds, “the NEDC is grossly underfunded ’’.