2016 budget: NASS returns corrected grey areas to Buhari

From Kemi Yesufu, Abuja

BARING unforeseen changes, the National Assembly will return corrected ‘grey areas’ of the N6.06 trillion 2016 budget to President Muhammadu Buhari today, Daily Sun learnt.

It was gathered that work on the corrected version of the budget for the president’s assent reached an advanced stage yesterday evening. This was just as ministers scrambled to meet with the Executive and National Assembly Joint Committee handling the corrections.

The joint committee met yesterday despite it being a public holiday.

Daily Sun gathered that ministers, who had not completed the needed adjustments to the budget of their ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) they supervise thronged the Transcorp Hilton Hotel in Abuja, which served as the secretariat of the joint committee.

Sources close to the committee said they had been informed of plans to present a clean copy of the corrected ‘grey areas’ to Buhari toda.

On Wednesday, April 27, the House of Representatives held an executive session where Speaker Yakubu Dogara told his colleagues of President Buhari’s willingness to sign the budget as soon as corrections were effected under different sub-heads on funds diverted from the various MDAs.

At the executive session, which lasted over two hours lawmakers heard of the agreement to constitute a large committee comprising three smaller committees from the House, Senate and the Presidency that would work on the final document to be presented to Buhari for assent.

Deputy Speaker Yussuf Lasun chaired the committee which also had Deputy Minority Whip, Binta Bello, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Abdulmumin Jibrin and Chairman of the Committee on Finance, Babangida Ibrahim as members.

Controversy has continued to trail the 2016 budget with an alleged cancellation of the N60 billion LagosCalabar rail project and allegations of “padding.”

Notwithstanding, Jibrin and his counterpart in the Red Chamber, senator Danjuma Goje have denied padding the budget and re-allocation of funds to projects that didn’t emanate from the  executive.

On Sunday, April 24, in a joint statement, Senate and the House of Representatives said all adjustments made to the budget were in tandem with submissions made by various sub committees of the Appropriation Committee.

“We must put it on record that the details aggregated and transmitted to the executive are largely the inputs we received from the standing committees of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.”