Politics
Senate Leadership: How Ekweremadu’s election caused budget impasse
Fresh findings have revealed how the emergence of Senator Ike Ekweremadu as the Deputy Senate President of the 8th Senate caused the on-going budget impasse.
According to investigations, the political crisis that came up with having a an opposition figure as deputy president of the Senate led to the crisis currently delaying the signing of the 2016 budget by President Muhammadu Buhari.
The presidency, sources said, vowed not to have anything to do with Ekweremadu, who it believed usurped a position that should have been occupied by an All Progressives Congress, APC Senator.
Knowledgeable sources at the National Assembly reveal that in the past, an ad-hoc committee, led by the Deputy President of the Senate and the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives supervised works on the budget.
Read also: Plot to succeed kicks off as APC Senators queue behind Ekweremadu
The committee, the sources said, was comprised of the director-general of the Budget Office, senior officials of the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Presidency and the chairmen of the Senate and House Committees on Appropriation.
“It was the work of that committee to clean the budget and address all issues of concern between the executive and legislative branches of government and all issues that erupted were quietly settled under the guidance of the Deputy Senate President and the Deputy Speaker.
“For the past eight years, Senator Ike Ekweremadu was involved, but you know as a result of the issues around his emergence, nobody in the Presidency wanted to deal with him and you can see that committee was not formed and you see how we ran into this problem,” the source disclosed.
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