President Muhammadu Buhari has finally written the National Assembly over the 2016 budget, pointing out
the discrepancies in the Appropriation Bill passed by the federal lawmakers.
This was disclosed by the spokesman of the House of Representatives, Abdulrazak Namdas, in a meeting with journalists at the National Assembly.
According to Namdas, the President has sent a letter to the National Assembly outlining the “grey areas” in the 2016 budget that need to be addressed.
“I can confirm to you that we are in possession of the letter from the President identifying grey areas,” he said.
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It would be recalled that the 2016 budget ran into another round of controversies after the appropriation document was transmitted to the President for assent. The President withheld assent on the grounds that the version the lawmakers transmitted to him was not implementable, as several projects of national significance were either out rightly removed or allocations to them slashed while projects deemed to be constituency based and somewhat personal to the lawmakers was injected in the budget.
The Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udo Udoma, had also on Wednesday, hinted that the Federal Government was yet to conclude talks with the lawmakers on the 2016 budget, but has gone ahead to set up a monitoring and evaluation mechanism to make sure that the budget delivers what it promised when finally signed by the President.
Udoma stated this after the Federal Executive Council meeting at the State House, Abuja.
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