Fayose on 2016 budget: Nigeria may be forged under Buhari

Ayodele Fayose, Ekiti state governor, has described the controversy surrounding the 2016 budget as a “national embarrassment”, saying there is a possibility of Nigeria being forged under the President Muhammadu Buhari.

The governor advised Buhari to withdraw and present a new budget, criticising the anti-graft campaign of the current administration.

“If under a president that says he is fighting corruption, the budget of the country got missing and we are now being told that the budget being considered by the national assembly has been forged, one cannot but be afraid that there is possibility of Nigeria being forged one day, after the original must have gone missing,” read a statement issued on Fayose’s behalf by Lere Olayinka, his spokesman.

“The president should admit that there were avoidable errors in the budget and since he is human and not immune to errors, he should simply do the needful by presenting a new and credible budget to the national assembly.

“The revelation of Health Minister, Isaac Adewole, that the proposal drawn up by the ministry and submitted to the budget office had been doctored and that “foreign” appropriations, different from what was submitted, had been sneaked is the height of national embarrassment.

“While addressing the senate committee on health during its budget defence session on Monday, Prof Adewole had stunned the senators when he said: ‘We have to look into the details of the budget and re-submit it to the committee. This was not what we submitted. We’ll submit another one. We don’t want anything foreign to creep into that budget. What we submitted is not there’.

“The minister went further to say that in the revised budget as re-submitted, N15.7 billion for capital allocation was moved to other areas and that there was nothing allocated to public health and family health.

“Last week, we were told that the senate discovered a sum of N10 billion questionably smuggled into the budget of the Ministry of Education for an allegedly questionable subhead.

“Also, we were told of the existence of a budget mafia in the presidency that was said to be responsible for the embarrassing allocations in the budget.

“Before now, we were told that a total of N3.87 billion was allocated for capital projects at the State House Clinic alone, over N700 million more than capital allocation to all the 16 federal teaching hospitals combined.

“Now, a whole minister has come out to say that budgetary provision for his ministry was forged!”