Reps agree to re-examine 2016 budget

‎Yakubu Dogara, speaker of the federal house of representatives, says the lower legislative chamber has agreed “to re-examine the 2016 budget in view of the prevailing circumstances in Nigeria”.

‎Dogara made the announcement after an executive session of the house on Wednesday.‎

On Tuesday, the senate had expressed readiness to honour President Muhammadu Buhari’s wish for a Lagos-Calabar rail project, which was left out in the original budget, and asked the executive to submit a supplementary appropriation bill to the effect.

Abdullahi Sabi, spokesman of the senate, had maintained that the rail project was not in the original budget, and had advised the presidency not to set the people against the national assembly.

“That the Lagos-Calabar project was not in the budget does not undermine its importance. The national assembly is open whenever the executive brings the supplementary budget regarding the project it will be honoured,” he had said at the media briefing.

“The way forward is that we have passed budget, and we are saying bring a supplementary appropriation bill.”‎

On Wednesday, Abdulrazak Namdas, spokesman of the house, briefed journalists on the decisions reached by the lower chamber at the closed-door meeting.

“We were fully briefed by the chairman appropriation committee and we agreed as a chamber, as a house to delegate the speaker to please go ahead and engage the executive to identify the areas of concern and that he should report back to us with the hope that these things are in the national interest, and see that this country move forward,” he said.‎

“There are issues in particular, the Calabar-Lagos rail project that has been in the media, I want to reiterate here for the second time that the project was not among the project submitted by the president to the national assembly.
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“We are not saying that as a house that the Calabar-Lagos rail project is not good; we know it is a viable project. Our own area of concern is that people say this thing was in the budget and we removed it.

“That is why we are making these clarifications; and again, I want to state it clearly up till now as I speak, there is no communication from the executive, the president to the national assembly, as I speak about the budget.
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“All that we read in the media are other people’s opinions but Mr President has not come out clearly this and this is my problem with the budget that has been passed because as we were told, this budget has been taken back to ministries for them to examine and get back to the president.

“That is why we asked our speaker to liaise with the executive to lets us know what the issue is, because we are elected by the people and we are here to serve Nigerians‎.”