Minister of solid minerals, John Kayode-Fayemi has attributed to “an error of description” from the budget office, social media reports that his ministry will be updating its website for N795,234,275.00 (seven hundred and ninety five million, two hundred and thirty four thousand naira).

In a statement issued through the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Solid Minerals Development, M.F. Istifanus, the former Governor of Ekiti State said “The attention of the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development has been drawn to social media reports concerning an aspect of the proposed 2016 budget line item of the Ministry with the description “Website Update”.

“The Ministry has been inundated with requests from well-meaning Nigerians seeking clarifications on the N795,234,275.00 purportedly budgeted for the website update”.

The statement added that: “In preparation for the 2016 budget, a clear gap highlighted in the work of the Ministry was the need to improve the IT infrastructure and adopt appropriate technology to automate the operations of the Ministry and its agencies.

“A number of activities were conceived by the Ministry to address these gaps.  These include the acquisition of adequate ICT infrastructure to ensure all required data and business processes are efficiently, effectively and transparently handled. It also involves automation and management of the mining rights/titles with on-line application processing, status tracking and open section for verification of valid mining licenses.

“This is to be done through the deployment of an Enterprise Resource Planning Solution across the 10 agencies and 12 departments under the Ministry”.

Fayemi said the budget office wrongly summarized all the ICT work his ministry intends to carry out as “website update”.

“These were submitted to the Budget Office, which summarized it as “WEBSITE UPDATE” which is only a tiny component of the project. This is an error of description. The budget line was intended to address the overall ICT infrastructure improvement in the Ministry and its agencies”, the statement read.