Buhari may sign budget today

 President Muhammadu Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari is likely to sign the 2016 budget today, sources told Daily Trust yesterday.
This followed the submission of the clean copy  of the budget to the president  by the National Assembly yesterday.

 

The legislators altered the budget in many ways as a result of which the President withheld assent.
The appropriation bill kept going back and forth several times until a panel made up of members from both sides met for several days last week to resolve the impasse.
Sources told Daily Trust that the panel had now substantially restored the budget to its original form and that Buhari will assent to it today.

The Senior Special Assistants to the President on National Assembly Matters Ita Enang (Senate) and (Samaila Kawu (House of Representatives) handed over the document to Buhari yesterday.
Enang and Kawu left the Aso Rock Presidential Villa without speaking to journalists.
But the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, confirmed to our correspondent last night that Buhari received the document yesterday.
The presidential spokesman, however, declined comment on when the president would give his assent to the budget.

Asked if the president would sign the budget today, Shehu said “It depends on what is contained in the document.”
According to the presidential aide, the document still has to be looked at before the president signs it.
House Deputy spokesman Jonathan Gaza Gbefwi (PDP, Nasarawa) told journalists at a press conference that the document had been to the presidency.

“I can confirm to you that the resolutions of the committee have been submitted to the president, and I’m quite optimistic that in a very near future the budget will be signed into law,” he said.
One of our sources said from all indications, the president would sign the budget today.
“There are high chances that the budget will be signed tomorrow (today). In fact, I can tell you that the chances are up to 70 percent, because all the necessary things have been done and the president is already in possession of the document,” the source said.

The government announced yesterday it had mapped out 34 strategic priority programmes and projects it intended to achieve with the 2016 budget.
These include a capital spend minimum of 30 percent annually, an appropriate and predictable exchange regime by the end of 2016, increased low interest lending rate of nine percent, self-sufficiency in tomato paste in 2016 and rice production by 2018 and to increase local production of maize, soya beans, poultry and livestock and to stop import. 

Others are to provide 7,000 megawatts of electricity, to complete the Kaduna-Abuja-Ajaokuta ‎railway lines in 2016, to rehabilitate and construct 31 major road projects, to adopt and execute comprehensive national oil and gas policy  and to rehabilitate 5,000 primary health centres in 5,000 wards this year.

Read more: Buhari may sign budget today