National Assembly Tampered With The 2016 Budget – Report

Buhari-Budget Presentation

The Presidency and the Federal Executive Council (FEC) have identified eight major ways in which the National Assembly tampered with the 2016 Appropriation Bill sent to President Muhammadu Buhari last Thursday for his assent, The Nation reports.

The infractions were detected by the ministers at their Friday’s emergency meeting called to vet the budget details.

In contention are funds proposed by the executive for key infrastructure projects but which were either removed from the budget or slashed drastically by the National Assembly in the details presented to him. One of these is the Coastal Railway project which the President plans to discuss with the Chinese government during his visit to the country this week.

Government earmarked N60 billion counterpart funds for the project but the National Assembly removed it completely from the budget details.

The Nation gathered that President Buhari had planned to assent to the Appropriation Bill yesterday but the “strategic and fundamental errors/ oversights” in the details may now delay it by a week as the president will be away in China this week.

The Presidency also found that the NASS expunged the Calabar – Lagos rail line project from the budget details; reduced allocation to the completion Idu-Kaduna rail project by N8.7b; slashed allocations for the completion of all major road projects across the country; proposed new roads for which studies have not been conducted; dropped proposals for the purchase of essential drugs for major health campaigns like Polio and AIDS; cancelled or reduced allocations for diversification projects under Agriculture and Water Resources; and diverted funds for rural health facilities and boreholes for which provisions had been made elsewhere.

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