After what seems like eons, the National Assembly finally deemed it fit to pass the 2017 Appropriation Budget. The N7.441 billion budget was passed today after the Appropriations Committees of both the Senate and the House of Representatives separately presented their harmonized reports of the budget for consideration.
The passed budget has an increase of about N16 billion to the N7.28 billion proposed budget submmited to the National Assebly by President Muhammadu Buhari in December last year.
According to the report, N434.4 billion was appropriated for statutory transfers to the National Judicial Council (N100 billion); Niger Delta Development Commission (N64.02 billion); Universal Basic Education (N95.2 billion); National Assembly (N125 billion); Public Complaints Commission (N4 billion); INEC (N45 billion); and National Human Rights Commission (N1.2 billion).
The seven establishments are to get allocations on first line charge. In practice, the spending details of these offices are not made public.
The less than 500-member National Assembly earmarked N125 billion for itself in a country of over 170m.
In the breakdown of the National Assembly budget released by Mr. Abdullahi, the Management, Senate the House of Representatives are to receive N14,919,065013, 31,398,765,886 and 49,052,743,983.
Other appropriations under the National Assembly are as follows: legislative aides, 9,602,095,928; NASS Service Commission, 2,415,712,873; PAC-Senate, N118,970,215; N142,764,258; General Services, N12,584,672,079; NASS Legislative Institute, 4,373,813,596; and Service Wide Vote, 391,396,169.
The National Assembly also appropriated N2,987,550,033,436 for non-debt recurrent expenditure of the MDAs that are not under statutory transfers club.
Capital expenditure is slightly less, taking N2,177,866,775867.
For debt service, the National Assembly earmarked N1,488,002,436,547 to service domestic debts; N175,882,993,952 for foreign debts; and 177,460,296707 for sinking fund to retire maturing loans, totalling 1,841,345,727,206 for debt service.
In his remark, Minority Leader, Godswill Akpabio, reckoned that the 2017 budget marked the first time capital expenditure would reach 30 per cent.
