BREAKING NEWS, Politics
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MORE than a week after the 2016 budget was passed by the National Assembly, President Muhammadu Buhari was yet to receive details of the approved appropriation bill. The development has prevented Buhari from signing it into law and consequently, delayed its implementation.
A senior official in the Presidency said Buhari could not sign the budget into law because the passed budget had no details. According to him, the National Assembly only sent in the highlights without the details of the budget.
The source said Buhari had been anxious to give assent to the bill, but that he was concerned that signing the budget without details could result into giving approval to an un-implementable spending plan.
“As a result, the president has been handicapped in signing the bill because he does not know what is contained in the details and what adjustments the National Assembly must have made to the proposal sent to them. “Although he is anxious to sign the document so that implementation could start immediately and ease the tension in the economy and polity, he is afraid he may later discover, when the details are sent, that what is contained therein is not implementable.
“He wishes the National Assembly could send in the details speedily so that it could be considered for assent,’’ the source said.
Ministers, also eager that the budget be signed so they could start implementing their programmes, are unable to push the president to sign what has been transmitted because they also do not know what is contained in the details.
“They are particularly worried that the year is gradually aging and the provision of the law in respect of spending the previous year’s budget is not helping matters because of the low capital provision for 2015.
“Because of the low provision made last year for capital expenditure, spending 50 percent of that provision for the first half of this year will make no impact on provision of infrastructure.”
The source noted that the Budget Office could not work on the budget for implementation because it is the details, and not the highlights, that they convert into implementable templates for the respective ministries, departments and agencies, MDAs.
As the source noted: “This latest development confirms speculations that the National Assembly either did not complete work on the budget or are playing politics with the documents which affects the life of both the country and its citizens.’’
The development has showed that the suspicious relationship between the two arms of government over the 2016 budget appears to be far from being over.
A school of thought further said that the National Assembly might just have passed the bill with a view to passing the buck to the executive and escape the wrath of the public which was gradually suspecting it of sabotage.
The harmonised N6.06 trillion budget was finally passed by both chambers of the National Assembly on Wednesday, March 23, after weeks of bickering over controversial allocations in the N6.08 trillion proposal submitted by Buhari on December 22, 2015.
Details of the approved appropriation showed that N1.59 trillion was allocated for capital expenditure, and N2.65 trillion for recurrent expenditure, while about N1.48 trillion was approved for debt servicing.
The lawmakers also approved about N2.2 trillion as deficit, with N500 billion going for social intervention projects and N351.4billion for Statutory transfers.
— Mar 30, 2016 @ 13:40 GMT
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