President Buhari Slashes National Assembly Budget by N14.5bn

President Buhari Slashes National Assembly Budget by N14.5bn

President Muhammadu Buhari has cut the budget of the National Assembly by N14.5 billion.

The federal legislature got N139.5bn in the 2018 budget, but under this year’s budget, the president proposed the sum of N125bn for the lawmakers, representing a reduction of N14.5bn.

Interestingly, the entire N125bn was under recurrent expenditure, with ‎overhead and capital having zero allocation.

The president had initially proposed the same N125bn for the lawmakers in 2018, but the legislators jerked it up to N139.5bn, a development that did not go down well with the executive arm.

For four years running, between 2010 and 2013, the National Assembly’s annual budget was N150bn each year, making a total of N600bn for the four years alone.

The lawmakers’ subsequent budgets hovered around N120bn, until Buhari reduced it further to N115bn in 2016, which the lawmakers approved.

For many years, there had been no details for the National Assembly budget, until in ‎2017 when the two chambers made details of their budget public following sustained public pressure.