By Giwa SHILE
National Chairman, National Conscience Party (NCP), DrYunusaTanko, said controversy over 2018 budget increase by the National Assembly is fallout of the rift between the executive and legislature.
Tanko made the remark on Wednesday in Abuja.
The national assembly had in passing the Appropriation Bill, increased the figure form N8.16 trillion proposed by President MuhammaduBuhari to N9.12 trillion, indicating an increase of about N578 billion.
And, before signing the bill on Wednesday, at the Presidential Villa, Buhari picked hole with the action of the lawmakers, observing that some of the new provisions in the budget were not properly processed.
According to the president, I am concerned about some of the changes that the National Assembly has made to the budget proposals that I presented.
“The logic behind the constitutional direction that budgets should be proposed by the executive is that it is the executive that knows and defines its policies and projects.Unfortunately, that has not been given much regard in what has been sent to me.
“The National Assembly made cuts amounting to N347 billion in the allocations to 4,700 projects submitted to them for consideration and introduced 6,403 projects of their own amounting to N578 billion.
“An example of this increase is the budget of the National Assembly itself which has increased by N14.5 billion, from N125 billion to N139.5 billion without any discussion with the executive,” he noted.
Buhari, however, said he decided to sign the budget in order not to further slowdown the pace of recovery of the nation’s economy, which had doubtlessly been affected by the delay in passing the budget.
But, NCP chairman said that the argument about the additional figure by the legislators was as a result of the communication gap between the two arms of government.He said it was disheartening that the budget was just being signed into law.
“These are some of the problems we have been witnessing between the executive and legislature. They don’t come down and do their homework correctly.
“What I mean is that if there are issues, definitely they have an overriding function to perform because they are lawmakers; they do have constituency problems they want to look into.Now, if there are discrepancies with regard to the issue, they ought to have discussed this matter long before.
“But, there is a communication gap between the executive and the legislature, and at the end of it all, it is the people that suffer.You cannot imagine now, since the beginning of the year, we are just signing the budget for 2018 when the year itself is winding down. This is unbelievable.
‘’For me, I felt this signing would have taken place long before now, and that is why the economy is not working,” Tanko said.
He called for a synergy between the two organs in order to have a preferred budget that could be executed from the beginning of the year.
