House of Representatives over the weekend said it would not toil with the N6.08trn appropriation bill submitted by President Muhammadu Buhari for the 2016 fiscal spending.
Chairman, House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Abdulrazak Namdas, who addressed newsmen over issues surrounding the budget, said the amount would remain in spite of the controversies and discrepancies in the figures of almost all the Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs.
There have been issues arising from over bloated figures, replication of budgets, double allocations to capital projects, suspicious projects amongst others brought by the MDAs.
Consequently, the committees have had to send some government officials away to go and effect corrections before their budgets could be approved.
It is believed that with these corrections, the total budget figure ought to drop to a reasonable extent. But Namdas said the N6.08trn was unchangeable, even as he acknowledged that there were issues that came up in the budget.
Despite the issues, he said standing committees were advised to abide by the scheduled timeline for the budget defence, adding that the leadership of the House was working with the executive to fix them.
He noted that the National Assembly may or may not meet the February 25 date earlier set for passage of the budget. He said: “If February 25 is not met, Nigerians should bear with us. We may, we may not meet the deadline.”
