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“No Two Versions Of 2016 Budget,” PMB Tells NASS
Sends Corrected Version to Nass
President Muhammadu Buhari has informed the National Assembly that there are no two versions of the 2016 Budget, and that the version he presented to its joint sitting on Tuesday, December 22, 2015, remains the authentic document.
He also affirmed that there is no plan to withdraw or substitute the Money Bill as being insinuated.
The president made these declarations in separate letters he wrote to the leadership of both chambers of the National Assembly, copies of which were sighted by LEADERSHIP yesterday.
In the letter dated Friday, January 15, 2016, Buhari also explained that at the time he summited the draft Bill, accompanied by a schedule of details, the National Assembly was duly informed that the budget details had just been produced then and that the Executive would have to cross-check it to ensure that there are no errors in the detailed breakdown contained in the schedule.
According to him, the verification had been completed and the corrections had been subsequently submitted to the National Assembly, a development, he said, gave rise to the suspicion of the existence of different versions of the budget and the attendant confusion.
The president’s four-paragraph letter, whose content is to be revealed to lawmakers today at both the Senate and House of Representatives’ plenaries, is attached with the corrected version of the budget details, hence the National Assembly is expected to immediately begin work on the 2016 Appropriation Bill.
The presidential communication reads in part: “The National Assembly would therefore have the details as submitted on the 22nd and a copy containing the corrections submitted last week. It appears that this has led to some confusion.
“In this regard, please find attached the corrected version. This is the version the National Assembly should work with as my 2016 budget estimates. The draft Bill remains the same and there are no changes in any of the figures.”
This latest revelation by the president may have helped to dispel claims by the Senate president, Bukola Saraki, that the senior special assistant to the president on NASS Matters (Senate), Senator Its Enang, had attempted to smuggle a different version of the budget into the National Assembly other than the one presented by the president.
Senate to conclude, pass 2016 budget by February
The Senate said yesterday that it would ensure that consideration of the 2016 budget presented to a joint session of the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari on December last year would be concluded and passed before the end of next month.
Senate leader, Senator Ali Ndume, who made the position known, said senators had planned to pass the budget on record time, but blamed the delay on recent misgivings about the alleged missing budget, even as he described the budget as failing integrity test.
“We are targeting end of February to round off everything about the 2016 national budget. If not for the talk about the missing budget, we would have gone far. But we are still determined to pass the budget on time and that will be before the end of February,” he said.
Briefing Senate correspondents at the National Assembly Complex, Ndume also hinted that the Senate will today quiz the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Godwin Emefiele, over the persistent free fall of naira against major international currencies.
He also dismissed the call by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the impeachment of President Muhammadu Buhari by the Senate as a big joke.
On the CBN governor, Ndume explained that the Senate’s decision to invite Emefiele for questioning became necessary because the lawmakers needed to be properly briefed on the next line of action.
He said, “The CBN governor is coming tomorrow (today). I raised a point of order because there is the need for the National Assembly to ask questions about the skyrocketing price of dollar in the black market. The difference between the official exchange rate and that of the black market is too high. We need to ask questions so that we can report back to the common man. It has never been this bad.
“This is my personal opinion. The Bureau De Change (BDC) is now a big employment avenue. If you shut it down, there will be a problem. At the same time, you should not open the windows for people to abuse the process,” he said.
The Senate leader, who also maintained his earlier stance that the 2016 budget was not missing, said the Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions was only mandated to carry out an integrity test on the two copies of the budget before the Red Chamber.
He said: “Not only that the budget was not missing; the budget cannot be missing. The budget comes in copies. The copy submitted by Mr. President cannot be missing. There are some issues that came later surrounding the budget.
“We told the Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions to find out what happened and they discovered that there were two versions. What the president submitted as a bill is still there. Nothing has changed.”
On the call by the PDP for the National Assembly to commence an impeachment process against President Buhari following his alleged involvement in the budget crisis, Ndume described it as a huge joke and insisted that Buhari remained the kind of president the country needed at the moment.
He said, “The PDP calling for the impeachment of Buhari is a big joke. Did we kill the PDP for what they did to us in the last 16 years? The call for the impeachment of the president by the PDP is what they are supposed to do. They are in the opposition.
“Buhari is the kind of leader the country wants. His emergence is a divine intervention. We were in the opposition and I understand. The game the PDP is playing is understandable. The budget is not missing.”
