The speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, has stated that President Muhammadu Buhari may present the 2023 budget to the National Assembly in October, 2022.
Gbajabiamila made the announcement on Wednesday while inspecting the ongoing renovation work on the green chamber and the construction of the National Assembly Service Commission (NASC) office.
President Buhari according to NAN will present and lay before the two chambers of the national assembly next month the proposed ₦19.76 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2023.
“I am hoping that the budget will be presented latest by the first week of October,” he said.
The speaker stated that the temporary chamber will be ready for use when the house returns from its two-month recess next week, Tuesday, September 20, 2022.
He predicted that the 10th assembly would be inaugurated in the temporary chamber, unless the project managers were able to complete the renovation of the main chamber months ahead of schedule.
“You see that the old chamber has been ripped apart. The innovations are going to be state-of-the-art.
“We will at the end of the day be proud to have a chamber that matches the best standard all over the world.
“I am quite impressed with the work so far,” he said.
“I will encourage them to double the pace.
“Because as it is, unfortunately, or fortunately, this is not for the benefit of the 9th assembly, it is for the benefit of the 10th assembly.
“The old chamber is not going to be ready until sometime in August 2023 so we are talking about close to a year.
“But so far so good, we are happy and this temporary site is where we will be sitting for the next nine or 10 months.
“It is honestly a far cry from where we used to be but they have done well in adapting.
“The 10th assembly is most likely (taking off here) unless work can be accelerated but we don’t want to accelerate work and compromise the quality of work.
“So it is better late but done well, everything worth doing is worth doing well.”
Speaking at the construction site, NASC commissioner Bassey Etuk said the 400-capacity building would cost ₦11.6 billion.
“This project is the permanent site of the NASC and the reasons we are moving here are various: security, proximity to the service targeted functions,” he said.
“Here we have enough space, we are presently at an occupied rented apartment and here we cater for all our needs.”
