President Muhammadu Buhari has blamed the National Assembly (NASS)
for some strategic cuts in the 2018 appropriation bill for the provision of national
and regional infrastructure projects like the Mambilla Power Plant, Second
Niger Bridge/ancillary roads, the East-West Road, Bonny-Bodo Road, Lagos-Ibadan
Expressway and Itakpe-Ajaokuta Rail Project, reports ITRealms.
Revealing this Wednesday during the signing of the 2018 appropriation
bill, Buhari lamented that an aggregated N11.5 billion was cut off the
strategic infrastructure vote, just as the bill for provisions of some ongoing
critical infrastructure projects in the FCT, Abuja especially major arterial
roads and the mass transit rail project, were cut by a total of N7.5 billion.
Although he expressed thanks
to the leadership of the National Assembly, particularly the Senate President
and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, as well as all the distinguished
Senators and Honourable Members, for passing the 2018 Appropriation Bill, after
seven months.
“When I submitted the 2018 budget proposals to the National
Assembly on 7th November 2017, I had hoped that the usual
legislative review process would be quick, so as to move Nigeria towards a
predictable January-December financial year. The importance of this
predictability cannot be overemphasized,” he said.
Also, he noted that while the Federal Government’s budget
represents less than 10 per cent of aggregate yearly expenditures in the
economy, it has a very significant accelerator effect on the financial plans of
other tiers of government, and even more importantly, the private sector, which
mostly operates on a January-December financial year.
For Mr. President, NASS is working towards improving the budgeting
process and restoring our country to the January-December fiscal cycle,
stressing that the National Assembly is working on the enactment of an Organic
Budget Law, so as to improve the efficiency of the nation’s budgetary process.
“As I mentioned during the
presentation of the 2018 Appropriation Bill, we intend to use the 2018 Budget
to consolidate the achievements of previous budgets and deliver on Nigeria’s
Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) 2017-2020,” President Buhari said.
He further expressed concern over some of the changes that the
National Assembly made to the budget proposals that was presented, insisting that
the logic behind the Constitutional direction that budgets should be proposed
by the Executive is that, it is the Executive that knows and defines its
policies and projects.
Buhari described as “Unfortunately, that has not been given much
regard in what has been sent to me. The National Assembly made cuts
amounting to N347 billion in the allocations to 4,700 projects submitted to
them for consideration and introduced 6,403 projects of their own amounting to N578
billion.
Lamenting that many of the projects cut were critical and may be
difficult, if not impossible, to implement with the reduced allocation as some
of the new projects inserted by the National Assembly have not been properly
conceptualized, designed, costed and will therefore be difficult to execute.
Furthermore, he pointed out that many of these new projects
introduced by the National Assembly have been added to the budgets of most MDAs
with no consideration for institutional capacity to execute them or the
incremental recurrent expenditure that may be required.
“As it is, some of these projects relate to matters that are the
responsibility of the States and Local Governments, and for which the Federal
Government should therefore not be unduly burdened,” he maintained.
Uboshe Uboshe/GEE
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