The Chairman, House Committee on Appropriation, Abubakar Bichi has given a breakdown of the increased Appropriation Bill passed by both chambers of the National Assembly.
Bichi explained that the committee had held a one-way town hall meeting to get the inputs of citizens on the Apppropration noting that the presentation of the budget in late November was not in sync with extant laws which required the Appropriation Bill to be presented to the parliament three months to the end of the fiscal year.
He said the late presentation of the Apppropration Bill put pressure on the committee in processing the 2024 budget.
Bichi, while fielding questions from journalists at the end of the special session on Saturday explained that the N1. 2 trillion increase was because of inflation, as well as the promise by Government Owned Enterprises ( GOEs) to increase their revenue.
He said, “we have inflation and exchange rate for the dollar, the executive proposed N750 to the dollar, but after we studied carefully, we look at it , it is unrealistic.
“So we increased to N800. And also we had a meeting with the GOEs, we believe that there submissions is not enough. They have agreed to increase their revenue. Thats how we are able to get that N1.2 trillion, which we applied to capital.
“This is the first time the capital is bigger than recurrent. We appropriated about N850 billion.for education, we gave them a lot of money. I believe this budget is brilliant and Nigeriablns will see a lot of impacts.”
A breakdown of the Appropriation Bill passed by the National Assembly indicates that N1, 742,786, 788,150 is for statutory transfers; N8, 270, 960,606,831, debt servicing; N8, 768, 513, 380, 852, recurrent (non debt) expenditure and N 9,995, 143,298,028 as contribution to development fund for capital expenditure.
For statutory transfers, the
National Judicial Council got the sum of N341,625,739,236
Niger-Delta Development Commission
N338,924,732,832, 28
Universal Basic Education Commission
N263,043,551,250, 29 ;Senate N49,144,916,519, House of Representatives, N78,624,487,169.
For the Presidency N97,913,321,898, 40
and N82,922,332,768 , 163 recurrent and capital respectively.
Also, the Ministry of Defence got
N1,308,493,771,066, 41 as recurrent and N339,286,557,299 for capital; Ministry of Works got N39,374,777,404, 68 and N892,461,262,656 191 for recurrent and capital expenditure respectively.
Similarly, Ministry of Education got N857,134,132,339, 80 for recurrent and
N417,579,107,875, 203 for capital.
