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More headaches for Buhari as NASS halts budget passage

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National Assembly of self-seekers

The growing crisis over the 2016 proposed budget may have taken a turn for the worse, as the National Assembly,  on Tuesday said it was postponing the passage of the document indefinitely.

The National Assembly had earlier slated February 25 for the passage of the budget.

According to the lawmakers, the suspension of the passage is as a result of discrepancies, errors and ambiguities discovered in the submitted document.

The lawmakers stated this at a joint press conference in Abuja led by Senator Danjuma Goje (APC-Gombe State), who chairs the Senate Committee on Appropriation and Abdulmumin Jibrin (APC-Kano), who also chairs the House Committee on Appropriation, adding that the National Assembly could not guarantee any future date for the passage of the budget.

They also brushed aside insinuations that there is a rift between them and the executive arm of government, explaining that they are merely trying to do a proper clean up of the budget.

“We need sufficient time to pass a comprehensive budget …. that is implementable and also acceptable,” Mr. Jibrin said, noting that the Presidency had admitted errors in the budget.

The media had been awash with alleged discrepancies in the budget proposal and appearances by officials of Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, before committees of the National Assembly showed that it is fraught with fraudulent  allocations.

It would be recalled that the Senate also discovered the sum of N10 billion allegedly  smuggled into the budget of the Ministry of Education for a questionable subhead, while Health Minister, Isaac Adewole, distanced his ministry from the budget proposals for the ministry, adding that “rats” had doctored the proposal.

“We have to look into the details of the budget and re-submit it to the committee.

“This was not what we submitted. We’ll submit another one. We don’t want anything foreign to creep into that budget. What we submitted is not there.”

Similarly, the Minister for Works, Power and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, also evaded questions on a N500 million proposed for “statutory” meetings and travels.

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