By Paul Effiong, Abuja
House of Representatives Committee on Army has vowed to assist the Nigerian Army through adequate budgetary provisions to enable it tackle all forms of insecurity facing the nation.
Speaking yesterday in an interview with Journalists shortly after a closed-door meeting with the Acting Chief of Army Staff, COAS, Olufemi Oluyede at the National Assembly, Abuja, the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Army, Hon Aminu Balele promised his Committee’s readiness to do all that is humanly possible to assist the Army in order to execute its mandates.
According to him “We are committed to providing unwavering support, fostering cooperation, and maintaining solidarity with our military counterparts while he urged the Army leadership to be “rest assured of his committee’s determination to champion the welfare of troops to ensure adequate power provisions, and promote capacity building at all levels.
“Today, we have achieved a lot in the sense that we have analyzed and scrutinized the 2024 budgets and more importantly before we move into 2025 we ask so many fundamental questions, particularly what is happening in the country and way forward and you know this is a security committee.
“They give us some security inputs whereby we support, we have to support them to see that in the next in a short of time they have addressed the question of this insecurity largely in all over the country.
Earlier, the Acting Chief of Army Staff, COAS, Olufemi Oluyede who appeared before the Committee was not allowed to speak in the presence of Journalists; after a member of the Committee had raised a point of order that journalist should be excused during the defence.
Earlier, the Chairman who also spoke on the budget defence acknowledged the need to improving the Nigerian Army Capital, overhead cost and other allowances to be in tandem with best practices.
It was gathered that the Army had done very well in the 2024 budget implementation describing it as excellent performances.
“They have achieved over 99% in terms of implementation and more to it we have sent our colleagues and we have gone all around the country during the oversight function”.
