From Ndubuisi Orji, Abuja
House of Representatives, on Thursday, passed the N2. 176 trillion supplementary budget presented to the National Assembly by President Bola Tinubu for the 2023 fiscal year. However, the House moved the N5billion proposed for a presidential yacht to the Students Loan Scheme.
The N5billion proposal for the presidential yacht, which was captured under Nigerian Navy subhead, had attracted severe criticism from members of the public.
Prior to the passage budget, the report of the House Committee on Appropriation on the supplementary appropriation bill, was considered and approved at the Committee of Supply, jointly chaired by the speaker, Tajudeen Abbas and the deputy speaker, Benjamin Kalu.
The Supplementary Appropriation Bill had scaled first and second reading on Tuesday. While the Appropriation Committee had a budget defence session for ministers and heads of security agencies, as well as the Independent National Electoral Commission ( INEC) on Wednesday.
The chairman, House Committee on Appropriation, Abubakar Bichi, while giving a breakdown of the supplementary budget approved by the Green Chamber, told journalists, in an interview , that the budget for Defence was jerked up from N456 billion to N546,209,009,671, because of the security situation in the country.
Bichi explained that the budget for the Office of the National Security Adviser was also increased from N27 billion to N50 billion. While the Service Wide Vote was reduced from N615 billion to N515 billion.
According to him, “The Ministry of Defence has the largest share; because you know how our security is. We have interaction with them and they requested for additional funds. And we increased the N456billion ( proposed)
N546,209,009,671. Police formation and Commands, we gave them N50 billion .
” The FCT, they have about N100 billion. The FCT, you know is very important to us. That is why we want to make sure that the FCT can compete with any city in the world. That is why we have decided to give them N100billion.