….The protest is premature —DTHA

By Festus Ahon

ASABA—Delta State chapter of Host Communities of Nigeria Producing Oil and Gas, HOSTCOM, yesterday, besieged the state House of Assembly complex, Asaba, protesting the 2016 budget of Delta State Oil Producing Areas Development Commission, DESOPADEC, alledging the non-accountability of N16 billion in the 2015 budget of the commission.

The protesters, led by their state Chairman, Dr Peter Egedegbe and  National Coordinator, Prince Maikpobi Okareme, who stormed the Assembly complex in over six buses at 9.30 a.m., said that siting projects outside oil and gas producing communities should be discontinued.

The people, in a protest letter addressed to the Speaker of the state House  of Assembly, called for the “full implementation of the 2015  budget as passed, especially projects that have been designed and for which tender documents have been prepared and ready for distribution.”

Stressing the need for higher budgetary provision for capital expenditure than recurrent, the protesters told the lawmakers to stop deliberation on the 2016 budget until the anomalies were attended to.

Alleging that the 2015 budget had not been fully implemented, they said: “All budget figures for 2015 were cleverly omitted to short change the host communities especially in capital project.”

Addressing the protesters, chairman,  House Committee on DESOPADEC in the state House of Assembly, Chief Denis Omovie, said that the protest was premature, adding that the House was yet to look into the budget sent to it last week for necessary legislative action.

Omovie said: “A budget is an instrument of law that passes through a process and the 2016 DESOPADEC budget cannot be an exception,” adding that it was not the place of Host Communities to tell the House how to do its work.

It will  be recalled that the Itsekiri Hostcom had last week protested against the provision of N600 million security vote in the 2016 budget of the commission.