REVEALED: How Nigerian Senate partook in budget padding, senator confirms

Daily Trust is reporting that the Nigerian Senate also padded the 2016 budget as revealed by some senators, whose names were not mentioned.

The Nigerian Senate has also been alleged to have padded the budget

“National Assembly is one, the Senate is not left out in the padding of the 2016 budget.

“As you know, the budget was harmonised by the Appropriation committees of both Chambers,” the report quoted the senator as saying.

The report also quoted a lawmaker as alleging that both appropriation committees of the House of Reps and the Senate connived to insert projects as line items in the budget.

According to the report, the lawmaker said: “Every budget item has to be agreed upon by the two chambers. All the things buried by the House leaders were also buried by the Senate.

“So, they both dug the same holes for those things to be buried in.

“As a matter of fact, the two appropriation committees worked together throughout the budget period before they reported back to the respective chambers for approval.

“Invariably what you have in the House is what you have in the Senate, but that of the Senate may even be worse.

“A minister told me that … they inserted an intervention project of N6 billion in his ministry, but when he told them one of the agencies under his ministry had a similar project, they opened up and said the project was meant for the them.

“You can remember what Ogbeh said after the budget defence. He said he saw some strange insertions in his ministry’s budget. That was done in connivance with the two appropriation committees,” the lawmaker said.

The Senate leader, Ali Ndume, in reaction, denied having knowledge of budget padding.

He said: “There is nothing like budget padding and now we don’t have budget, what we have now is Appropriation Act. The 2016 budget is now a law.

“Section 81 of the 1999 Constitution empowers the National Assembly to process the budget by adding, subtracting or even removing projects. So, the budget is now a law, can you say the Law has been padded?”

Ndume said the media blew the issue out of proportion.

Ndume as well as Dogara, who recently visited President Muhammadu Buhari, had earlier said there was nothing like padding of the budget. But Jibrin insists that the 2016 budget was padded by about N40 billion by Dogara and a few principal officers.

Jibrin also revealed a lot of other allegations including that the speaker often went home with huge unaccounted sums of money monthly.

Meanwhile, the presidency has said it is yet to act on the allegations against Dogara because the issues raised by Jibrin had not been referred to it.