Senate has instructed ministers and heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to appear before relevant committees in the Red Chamber to defend their agencies’ 2017 budgets.
This was just as Senate has, again, suspended plenary for one week, to enable affected MDAs appear before the various committees. The upper legislative chamber suspended plenary in January for three weeks, to enable members of the various committees attend to heads of MDAs.
Moving the motion, yesterday, to announce suspension of plenary, Senate Leader, Ahmad Lawan said some heads of MDAs refused to appear and defend their agencies’ budgets.
Speaking further on the issue, Senate President, Bukola Saraki warned that ministers and heads of MDAs must defend their budget on or before tomorrow.
He warned that few individuals cannot hold the whole nation hostage by refusing to honour invitations from committee heads in the Senate.
Saraki added that extension of the budget defence has also affected an earlier date set aside by the National Assembly to pass the 2017 budget.
He, however, assured that the new budget will be passed on or before the second week of March.
“Plenary has been suspended till next week, to allow committees complete the budget defence. From the meeting we had on Tuesday, it shows that a number of ministers and chief executives of MDAs have not appeared for their budget defence and we are going to give them today and tomorrow to do that.
“We have already lost a week because we should have finished this by last week and start receiving reports.
“This is a final warning to all those required to ensure that, unfailingly, by today or tomorrow, they should appear before the committees. After that, the committees are allowed to do as they wish on their budgets,” Saraki said.
The senate president also spoke on a planned meeting between the Senate leadership and acting President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, to resolve grey areas in the budget.
“Those expected to re-submit certain corrections should do so by the end of Friday. It is our hope that by next week, all reports would have been submitted to the Appropriation Committee for them to start receiving reports from sub-committees that have completed theirs.
“The leadership will also be meeting with the acting president this evening (yesterday) to try and iron out these issues. This is because we are determined to pass this budget within the second week of March. That is our target. So, we hope this meeting will also help to speed up some of these discrepancies and clear them.”
Senate spokesman, Abdullahi Sabi, was more definitive. Addressing Senate Correspondents after the plenary, Sabi warned that heads of MDAs, who do not appear before the relevant committees, will have zero capital budget allocations.
On Tuesday, all standing committee chairmen in the Senate attended a closed door meeting with the senate president.
During the meeting, it was learnt that complaints from lawmakers dominated the discussions.
Lawmakers, it was learnt, told Saraki there were too many inconsistencies in the 2017 budget.
They alleged that the N500 billion intervention funds provided in the 2017 budget was vague. It was learnt that details was not provided on how the Federal Government intends to disburse the intervention funds to end-users.
Heads of MDAs, particularly the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, Mr Abubakar Malami was named as one of those who has refused to appear before the respective committees to defend budgets of their agencies.
The committee chairmen were said to have also complained that a number of ‘phoney’ proposals were found in the Appropriation Bill, included fake budgets for computers and other items that were duplicated.
(The Sun)
