Emergency FEC meeting moved to Monday

The meeting of the federal executive council (FEC), which was rescheduled for Friday, has again been shifted to Monday.

The meeting initially fixed for Wednesday could not hold as a result of the 48th ordinary session of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

Buhari hosted ECOWAS leaders in Abuja on Wednesday.

Announcing the development to state house correspondents, Lai Mohammed, minister of information, explained that some crucial issues cropped up at Thursday’s national economic council (NEC).

He said those issues need to be addressed in order to prevent a distortion of the 2016 budget.

“The meeting was postponed till Monday afternoon and the reason is because of the National Economic Council of yesterday,” he said.

“At that meeting, many of the key cabinet members made presentations. There were some fallouts from those presentations that will necessitate going back to the original document that should have been discussed today.

“So, we were given time between now and Monday to go and rejig our figures because when the NEC met, certain issues were thrown up that if they were not resolved, would distort the entire budget proposal.”

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo presided over the NEC meeting.

President Muhammadu Buhari will present the budget to a joint session of the national assembly on Tuesday.

At its last meeting, FEC approved the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), which was sent to the national assembly.

Subsequently, the sen‎ate approved the MTEF and retained the $38 oil benchmark for the budget as proposed by the federal government.