As reported two weeks ago, that President Muhammadu Buhari has withdrawn the Budget he presented to the National Assembly, the Presidency is confirming that President Buhari has now officially written to the Nationally Assembly to request the withdrawal of the 2016 Appropriation Bill for correction.
This development confirms the alleged secret extraction and doctoring of the original budget document according to Hope For Nigeria, and the presenting of a second version of the Budget through the back door last week.
The National Assembly could not start deliberation on the budget as scheduled after their resumption from Christmas recess, as the original copy of the budget was allegedly stolen and President Buhari Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters, Senator Ita Enang sneaking in a doctored copy with bogus and strange figures, which the Senator rejected outright.
The budget has been criticised by Nigerians and International financial Institutions, including IMF and those that are financially exposed to Nigeria.
Even President Buhari in a National television confirmed that he is not aware of some of the figures inside the budget he presented to the National Assembly on December 22, 2015. The embarrassed President and his party leadership have tried everything in the book to amend the original copy, but regrettably they more they modify the Budget the more error they will find in the budget.
It was gathered that Buhari had discovered after presenting the 2016 budget to the National Assembly that some of the figures proposed for operations in the Presidency and the State House were being publicly criticised as outrageous and higher than those of his predecessor, former President Goodluck Jonathan. Citing Buhari’s claimed austere nature and the Change agenda of his party, the figures for the subheads in the budget for the office of the president, vice president, and a few ministries, which went viral on the social media and had become a major topic of discussion on both the print and broadcast media, were a huge embarrassment.
Over 261 errors have been found in the original budget, some expenses were duplicated 6 times, some projects that have been completed by the former government or nearing completion were presented in budget as if they are new projects that need to be started from the scratch and Billions were allocated to them
The president was said to have directed the recall of the 2016 budget from the National Assembly for review to reflect the public mood. In normal situation, the review process should have entailed a written request from the president to the National Assembly calling for the withdrawal of the budget, it is certain that over 70% of the budget need to be looked into. Senator Enang, allegedly, embarking on a surreptitious process of changing the budget figures, was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters, Senator Ita Enang was accused by Senators of doctoring the contents of the 2016 Appropriation Bill presented to the National Assembly by Buhari.
The Senators said that, “what he distributed is different from what was presented by Mr. President and we have resolved not to address any version until we receive the version presented by Mr. President,” Saraki announced to the senators after an executive session that dwelled on a strange confusion about the substitution of the budget, which had raged since Monday. Enang’s indictment followed an investigation by the ethics and privileges committee of the senate.
THISDAY checks revealed that when Enang wanted to swap the original document, he attempted to reach the Clerk of the Appropriation Committee by telephone but could not get through. He then decided to call the Acting Clerk of the National Assembly, Mr. Nelson Ayewoh, and told him how he had attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to reach the appropriation clerk to collect a document from him.
Ayewoh, it was learnt, accepted to call the appropriation committee clerk and ask him to call Enang, but without knowing that the communication was in connection with the budget document.
The development has widened the rift in the ruling party, the APC, as their former Interim National Chairman of APC, Chief Bisi Akande, exchanged diatribes over controversy surrounding the 2016 budget. Akande, said the claim of missing 2016 budget from the upper legislative chamber was the furtherance of the indiscipline that produced Senate leadership.
Chief Akande opened the old wound on the compsoition of the senate leadership by adding that, the APC still did not believe in the composition of the upper legislative body. “When I first read in the newspapers that budget was missing in Abuja, you know I live in Ila and I don’t have all the details of what goes on in Abuja. I called the lawmaker representing my constituency and he told me that the budget presented to the House of Representatives was not missing. That showed some complications.
“The whole thing is borne out of indiscipline. You know when foundation of an assembly is indiscipline, the whole thing is bad. That assembly was not constituted the way my party wanted it. The process was hijacked and the leadership was constituted the way it is.
“So from such an assembly, you should expect all kinds of stories. The development regarding the missing budget may be caused by mishandling by people, who are not supposed to be in position. Mr. President should not be blamed for what is happening.
“Come to think of it, how can a document as voluminous as the budget of a whole nation go missing? With my experience in government, just a ministry may have up to 10 pages or up to 100 pages. Imagine you have 30 ministries, that means you will have a documents of 30,000. How on earth will such a large document get missing?”
Senator condemed Akande’s ill-informed and unguarded utterances, describing his reaction as another expression of the frustration which accompanied his inability “to impose his lackeys on the Senate as leaders.”
The Senate said it was regrettable that a man of Akande’s status could respond to speculations without cross-checking his facts, alleging that the former governor was always eager to exploit any available opportunity to bring into disrepute the leadership of the Senate because his candidates lost out in the power game.
Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Media, said if only Akande had chosen to check his record properly, he would see that “at no time did the Senate say the 2016 budget was missing.”
He said the Senate had insisted through several official statements and press interviews by its principal officers that the budget was not missing but two different versions of the budget were seen by senators. “We have said it several times that the budget was not missing; that two versions of the details of the budget exist and this is no longer in doubt as the Presidency has equally admitted this.
“We expect a man of Akande’s calibre to cross-check his facts and take us up on our words. That he decided to ignore the facts and make comments on speculations is regrettable. He is a man who had served in government. He is a leader of the party with the majority in the Senate and he has several channels of cross-checking facts as against speculations,” the statement stated.
Nigerians will be expecting the third or fourth the version of the the 2016 when the Presidency, Budget Office and the IMF economic Team must have review and re-prepared the appropriation bill.
The error filled budget came as a result of the haste and attempts to impress Nigerians that the 2016 Budget was presented in 2015. As the Presidency Economic Team and the Budget office have relatively no time to meet their budget submission deadline of December, 2015, they were alleged to have resorted to copying, pasting and addition to figures from Goodluck Jonathan Administration’s budget.
This is why Projects like the Zungeru Hydro Projects which is about 95% completed was treated as a New project according to the amount allocated to it in the budget and regrettably it appeared 6 times in the budget.
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