APC senator: Why hurry over 2018 budget when that of 2017 hasn’t achieved anything?

Adeola Olamilekan, an All Progressives Congress (APC) senator from Lagos state, says there is no need to hurry over the 2018 budget.

President Muhammadu Buhari presented a budget proposal of N8.6 trillion before the national assembly in November, expressing hope that it would be passed before the end of the year.

Udoma Udoma, minister of budget, has also spoken of the wish of the government to revert to the January-December budget cycle.

Olamilekan said it is unfortunate that the executive set an end of the year target for the legislature to pass the budget when the lawmakers do not have adequate information.

He spoke while contributing to a motion sponsored by Bala Na’Allah, deputy majority leader of the red chamber.

“There is no need to speed up work on 2018 because the 2017 budget has not performed anything,” he said.

“It is unfortunate that the set target to pass this budget before the end of the year is not visible.

“How can we consider 2018 budget without knowing the performance of 2017 budget, it’s an aberration and if you look at the documents of these MDAs, the facts are there. There are no clear calls in the 2017 budget to compare the 2018 budget.

“There in, you find out that the performance of the budget, there is nothing to write home about and there is no basis for us to rush.

“What we have before us those not show us that this executive is ready for this budget to be passed. The 2017 budget has not performed anything. There is need for us to be in hurry.”

On his part, Mathew Urhoghide, senator representing Edo south, said consideration of 2018 budget should be put “at bay because this executive is not serious”.

“If this executive is serious about 2018 budget, let them give us information about capital expenditure,” he said.

“Mr President the two ministers appeared before the joint committee and they gave us a document of all the releases they had made to all the MDAs and I think this meeting held three months ago the figures given were about 10 percent of the total capital expenditure and that another and of course another 100 billion was going to be given to ministry power, works and housing bringing it to N450 billion and they had mentioned in that session that earlier in the year they had extended the 2016 capital expenditure in to the first few months of 2017.

“If you look through the performance of 2017 as presented by some of the MDAs, there is really nothing to present, for personnel expenditure many of them are still complaining that what was appropriated to them is not enough, overhead of 2017 is worse as capital expenditure, so that many of the MDAs were not working on daily basis.”