#Budget 2016: Senate confirms Strange projects smuggled into document

The Senate, on Monday, explained why it rejected the 2016 Budget, saying the version submitted by President Muhammadu Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters, Senator Ita Enang had some strange projects smuggled into it which were not in the original one read by the President.

According to the Senate, the second version failed the integrity checks it was subjected to. The upper chamber of the National Assembly also described the call by the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP for the impeachment of President Buhari over the budget issue as “biggest joke of the year”

The Senate Leader, Mohammed Ali Ndume, disclosed this in Abuja when he briefed reporters, calling on Nigerians to discontenance insinuations that the budget was missing, adding that nobody ever declared the budget missing.

According to him, what happened was that some copies of the budget submitted to the Senate were subjected to “integrity checks” and they failed the checks when compared with the original copy presented to the National Assembly by President Buhari, noting that the Senate discovered some loopholes that made it to confirm the existence of two versions of the budget.

Continuing, Ndume said the Senate rejected the second version of the budget when it became apparent that some projects that were not accommodated in the original budget presented by President Buhari were injected into the budget.

He said: “There were issues with the budget that some people were not comfortable with. There were integrity checks and it was discovered that there were some loopholes.

“We asked the Ethics and Privileges Committee to find out what actually happened and it was discovered that there were two versions of the budget.

“It is not that the figure submitted by Mr. President has changed. It is still the same thing. It is not that what Mr. President submitted is sacrosanct, that it cannot be changed. It can be changed.

“It is not that the N6.08 trillion budget Mr. President submitted to us has changed or any of the subheads has changed. They are still the same.

“The President did not submit a failed document. The President submitted a budget, which went through integrity checks.

“I have my soft and hard copies of the budget. I spent most of the weekend looking at the budget.

“What I tried to do was to make a comparative analysis. So, I could not find the difference. But then they told me that the difference is not in the sub-total or sectoral allocation. They did integrity checks and they gave me an example.

“That if a certain amount was allocated to do two things and they felt that the amount can be used to do four things. They said instead of two things, do four. They are still talking about spending the same amount but getting more for it.

“But what I can tell you now is that the budget that was submitted originally, there were certain integrity checks on it that made some changes in the quantity but not in the total.”

The Senate Leader also frowned at the call for the President’s impeachment  by the PDP, calling it the biggest joke of the year.

He asked: “What are we to do with PDP for what they did to this country in the past 16 years? We are to kill PDP.

“Buhari is the kind of leader we want in Nigeria. The good thing is that now we have a president; before, we had something else.”

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