House of Representatives at the weekend said it would not tamper with the N6.08trn appropriation submitted by President Muhammadu Buhari for the 2016 fiscal spending. Addressing journalists over issues surrounding the budget, Chairman, House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Abdulrazak Namdas, said the amount would remain in spite of the controversies and discrepancies in the figures of almost all the Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs. There have been issues arising from over bloated figures, replication of budgets, double allocations to capital projects, suspicious projects amongst others brought by the MDAs.
Consequently, the committees have had to send some government officials away to go and effect corrections before their budgets could be approved. It is believed that with these corrections, the total budget figure ought to drop to a reasonable extent. But Namdas said the N6.08trn was unchangeable, even as he acknowledged that there were issues that came up in the budget. Despite the issues, he said standing committees were advised to abide by the scheduled timeline for the budget defence, adding that the leadership of the House was working with the executive to fix them. He noted that the National Assembly may or may not meet the February 25 date earlier set for passage of the budget. He said: “If February 25 is not met, Nigerians should bear with us. We may, we may not meet the deadline.”
He clarified that lawmakers were not given any money to carry out constituency projects in the budget as all constituency projects were appropriated to relevant agencies. Meanwhile, Senate Leader, Ali Ndume, yesterday said the Senate would strive to pass the budget before the end of March. In an interview, Ndume said March was the deadline for the implementation of the 2015 budget; as such it was the desire of the Senate to pass the 2016 budget before that time The leader said contrary to reports in the media, the Senate did not suspend its passage indefinitely, but only said the 25th of February may not be feasible. He said it was the wish of the National Assembly to pass the budget five weeks before the expiry of the period set for the implementation of the 2015 budget, but that was not possible due to some errors. “We have not postponed it indefinitely; we are saying that with the developments that we are seeing as the time goes on, the 25th February deadline we gave ourselves may not be realistic.
“That is why we now said that going by this, it is not possible to say we will come back on 25th and say this is the budget; we are not saying that we have suspended it indefinitely. “The reason we fixed 25th was because we wanted to have a gap of five weeks,” he said. He said the gap would have enabled the Senate fix whatever issues that needed to be handled before the lapsing of the March 31 deadline for the implementation of the 2015 budget. Ndume said the leadership of the National Assembly had met with ministers to iron out the grey areas and make corrections to the contentious areas as well. The Leader also assured that the Senate would ensure strict compliance with the implementation of the budget. He said that once funds were available, he was convinced that the present administration would ensure thorough implementation of the budget.
