The National Assembly on Friday stated that the response of President Muhammadu Buhari on the alleged 2018 Budget cut by the National Assembly is as result of lack of adequate information by his appointees.
Buhari had on Wednesday accused the federal lawmakers of tampering with the 2018 Budget sent to them by cutting essential projects and inserting non-essential ones.
But the National Assembly at a joint press briefing by both Senator Abdullahi Sabi, who is the spokesman for the Senate, and Hon. Abdulrazak Namdas, the spokesman of House of Representatives, said if the President had been properly informed by his appointees, he would not have raised those issues in his budget signing statement.
The statement reads in part: “It is our firm belief that if the President had been properly briefed by his appointees, he would not have raised most of the concerns that he did in his remarks at the budget signing. It is therefore inevitable for the legislature to give members of the public an insight into what transpired during the appropriations process and how we arrived at the decisions that are contained in the 2018 budget.
“It was stated that the legislature made cuts amounting to N347 billion which were meant for 4,700 projects. Again, these reductions of N347 billion were made from low priority areas to higher priority areas to support the generation of employment for our youth by MSMEs. We took the decision to reduce the funds in some areas in order to ensure balance and equity in the spread and utilization of our national funds. Additionally, the figures given amounts of the reductions made by the National Assembly were unduly exaggerated as we did not make any substantial reduction on any project to the extent of affecting its implementation.
“To give the exact detail of the projects where we made deductions, it should be noted that the counterpart funding for the Mambilla Power Plant, Second Niger Bridge/Ancillary roads, the East-West Road, Bonny-Bodo Road, Lagos-Ibadan Express Road and Itakpe-Ajaokuta Rail Project, was reduced by only N3,956,400,290 – which represents only 1.78% of the total N222,569,335,924 submitted by President Buhari. This left these projects with N218,612,935,634 which cannot negatively affect their implementation. This obviously contradicts the claim that these projects lost “an aggregate of N11.5 billion.”
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