Breaking News: NASS pass 2017 budget of N7.441 trillion
*Legislature to spend N10b higher than 2016 as NASS publishes budget details
The Nigerian National Assembly has passed the 2017 Budget, raising the budget from N7.28 billion earlier proposed by President Muhammadu Buhari in December last year, to N7.44 trillion.
The Committees on Appropriation of the Senate and House of Representatives separately presented their harmonised reports of the budget for consideration and subsequent passage on Thursday.
In the budget the National Assembly, for the first time, made open its budget details for 2017, with a total sum of N125, 000,000,000 to be spent this year.
With the figure, there is an increase of N10,000,000,000 as against the N115,000,000,000 approved for National Assembly in 2016.
The breakdown shows that of the N125 billion approved for the National Assembly, the Management has a vote of N14,919,065,013; the Senate has an allocation of N31,398,765,886 while the House of Representatives would spend N49,052,743,983.
The breakdown further shows that the Management would spend N6,714,696,986as personnel cost so; N6,192,052,825 for overhead costs and N2,011,315,202as total capital.
The Senate would spend N1,856,510,517 on personnel costs; N25,111,332,147 as total overhead costs and N4,430,923,222 as total capital.
For the House of Representatives, it has N4,923,743,127 as total personnel costs; N39,635,756,179 as total overhead costs and N4,493,244,677 as total capital.
Meanwhile, the total Budget for 2017 stands at N7.441 trillion.
It would be recalled that the Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, following the publication of his 2016 state/LG budgets, security votes and salary details recently, had challenged the National Assembly leadership to also publish its own budget details for 2016.
The NASS may have taken a queue from the el-Rufai’s financial bravery but without still making public details of its 2016 but 2017 budget details which it did through the passage of the 2017 Appropriation Bill.
