Senate Passes N8.9trn 2019 Budget

Posted by African Examiner Featured, Latest Headlines, News Tuesday, April 30th, 2019

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – The Nigeria’s Senate has finally passed the 2019 Appropriation Bill.

The budget was however increased from N8.83trn as originally presented by President Muhammadu Buhari last year to N8.916 trillion.

The passage Premium Times reported, follows the presentation of a report by the Chairman Senate committee on Appropriation, Danjuma Goje.

Senator Goje explained that the need to provide for the severance benefits of outgoing lawmakers, their aides, provision for the National Assembly orientation programme, election and others accounted for about N86 billion difference.

He added that there was also the need to provide more fund for the security and intelligence agencies to deal with the emerging, unforeseen security challenges in the country.

He said all of these were not captured in the 2019 budget submitted by the president.

The breakdown of the Budget is published as follows:

Statutory transfer – N502.58 billion

Debt service – N2.25 trillion

Recurrent expenditure – N4.65 trillion

Capital expenditure – N2.94 trillion

The Senate also approved a N10 billion fund to be drawn from service-wide votes to assist victims of Zamfara crisis.

The senior lawmakers adopted the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) earlier presented.

A daily production rate of 2.3 million barrels, at $60 per barrel as proposed by the executive was adopted, as the budget benchmark.

The Senate immediately communicated changes made to the budget to the House of Representatives, so as to evade the conference committee which could further stall the passage.

It would be recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari presented N8.83 trillion budgets to the joint session of the National Assembly (NASS) on December 19, 2018.