Buhari, Senators to meet over budget impasse

The Senate has raised a committee to meet with the presidency to review disputed areas in the 2016 budget with a view to resolving the continued delay in assenting to the document by President Muhammadu Buhari.

It would be recalled that the president had sent a list of the grey areas and mutilated items to the National Assembly, which included the Calabar-Lagos rail project.

This is even as the Federal Government said on Wednesday that it could not give a definite date on when the 2016 budget would be signed, as talks to reach a truce on the disputed areas in the document were still on going.

The senators made the decision to meet with the presidency on the budget issue at Executive Session held yesterday where they also expressed disappointment over how the issue had been handled, and how much negative publicity it had attracted to the legislature.

A committee comprising the chairmen of the Appropriation Committee (Danjuma Goje -Senate and Abdulmumin Jibrin-House of Representatives) and the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udoma Udo-Udoma and others was formed.

Meanwhile, on its part the executive has set up a Monitoring and Evaluation mechanism to ensure that the budget was duly implemented.

This was made known yesterday to newsmen after the weekly Federal Executive Council meeting.

Read also: EFCC disrobes Ekweremadu as ‘anti-corruption ambassador’

Minister of Budget and National Planning, Mr. Udo Udoma, who was flanked by his colleagues in the Ministries of Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu; Power, Housing and Works, Babatunde Fashola; Communication and Technology, Adebayo Shittu, stated that “On the expectation that we will soon have a budget, there is a monitoring and evaluation mechanism to make sure that the budget delivers what it promises. That mechanism was looked at by the Federal Executive Council and approved.

“To make sure that 2017 budget is done on time, a timetable was approved for the 2017 budget. In addition, council noted the report of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group which, in partnership with the National Planning Commission, organised an economic summit last year and made various recommendations.  These recommendations were presented and noted.”

Also, Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, said the queues being experienced by Nigerians as a result of the lingering fuel scarcity were expected to disappear by the end of next week.

“The queues are as a result of sabotage. Some people, rather than sell products, send them into hinterlands where they can sell at ridiculous prices and so you are having these price distortions where people are making a lot of money.

“Some are internal and some are external but a lot of it is marketers trying to make quick returns on their investments wrongly”, he stated.

On his part, Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, who spoke on the current power outages, explained that the damaged Forcados pipeline is principally what led to shortage of power supply in many parts of the country.

Fashola however assured Nigerians that the government was working to remedy the situation, adding that the 10,000 megawatts projected to be achieved by the President was realistic.

 

 

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