State House Budget Slashed by N100m

The 2016 budget for the State House may have been reduced by N100m from the N11,909,567,095 submitted by President Muhammadu Buhari three weeks ago to N11,809,567,097 uploaded on the website of the Ministry of Budget and National Planning Thursday on.

An analysis of the fiscal document, which was submitted by the President to a joint session of the National Assembly and the one uploaded on the website of the ministry showed a discrepancy of about N100m.

According to the hard copy of the 2016 budget for the State House, which was obtained by our correspondent after the proposal was laid by the President to a joint session of the National Assembly, the sum of N2,063,951,770 was allocated as overhead expenditure.

However, this figure, when compared to the N1,963,951,772 uploaded on Thursday on the ministry’s website, represents a decline of N99,999,998.

As a result, the total recurrent expenditure for the budget has dropped from N3,640,645,629 to N3,540,645,631.

Other expenditure items such as total personnel cost and total capital expenditure remained unchanged at N1,576,693,859 and N8,268,921,466, respectively.

Following the controversy surrounding the whereabouts of the 2016 budget at the Senate, the Budget and National Planning ministry finally uploaded the details of the fiscal document on its website.

The decision to make the document public was made after a meeting presided over by the Minister of Planning and Budgeting, Senator Udo Udoma.

It was gathered from top officials in the ministry that the Federal Government was seriously embarrassed about claims that the budget was smuggled out of the Senate by the Executive.

This, according to the officials, informed the decision to make the fiscal document available on the website of the ministry for all Nigerians to see.

Punch