The Chairman House Committee on Appropriations, Hon. Abubakar Kabir Abubakar (APC, Kano) has stated that, some important taken into consideration prompted the increase in the 2024 budget Appropriations from N27.5 trillion to N28.7 trillion by the National Assembly.
This was an increase of N1.2 trillion over the proposal earlier submitted by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to the joint sitting of the National Assembly.
The National Assembly passed the budget of N28.7 trillion for the 2024 fiscal year on Saturday.
Bichi, while fielding questions from journalists, explained that the N1. 2 trillion increase was because of inflation,as well as promise by Government Owned Enterprises ( GOEs) to increase their revenue to N700 billion.
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 . That how we are able to get that 1.2 trillion, which we applied to capital.
“This is the first time the capital is bigger than recurrent. We appropriate about N850 billion, education, we gave them a lot of money. I believe this budget is brilliant and Nigeriabs 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
N 49,144,916,519 ; 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.