Federal Government yesterday explained the delay in President Goodluck Jonathan’s assent to the 2014 Budget which has been passed by the two chambers of the National Assembly.
Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, told State House correspondents after the weekly Federal Executive Council, FEC, meeting that distortions in the appropriation bill was responsible for the delay.
Maku explained that it would not be appropriate for the government to overlook some serious misrepresentation in the fiscal document because of the possible negative effects on the economy.
Both chambers of the National Assembly had passed the appropriation bill of N4.695trillion for the fiscal year early last month and transmitted same to the President for assent.
The budget passed by the National Assembly is about N53 billion higher than the N4.642 trillion presented to it by the executive on December 19, 2013.
According to Maku, Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, briefed the council on the steps being taken to reconcile the discrepancies that emerged in its passage by the lawmakers.
“It is very sad that we have almost entered the middle of the year and we don’t have a budget. This indeed is sad that the budget has taken so long in coming and practically we have less than seven months to execute it.
“There are few areas of distortions and there are those areas that are very serious and we think there is need to look into them because of the negative impact those distortions may have on the implementation of the budget. We will do everything possible to reconcile the few differences that emerged in what was transmitted to the government by the National Assembly,” he said.
The Minister of Information however, explained that there is a lot of conversation going on now between the Federal Ministry of Finance and the National Assembly on the matter.
Meanwhile, the Federal Government has assured that the 2015 elections would not slow down the pace of work on the Second Niger Bridge.
Addressing State House correspondents after briefing the FEC meeting on the work so far done by the contractor on site, Minister of Works, Mr. Mike Onolememen, said the construction work would not suffer any setback because every precaution had been taken to avoid such.
The minister also spoke on the Gamboru-Ngala Bridge linking Nigeria to Cameroun which was damaged by suspected Boko Haram insurgents and assured that an assessment was being carried out on the bridge to determine the extent of damage.
“I want to assure you that the second Niger Bridge project is a project that has been neatly put together. It has nothing to do with politics. If you recall, the process for the award of the contract for that project started immediately I became minister of works. Being a Public/Private Partnership development, even in developed economies, PPP procurement takes longer time. We are a developing nation. We don’t have the luxury of time to wait that long. We have been able to abridge the process and we have been able to go this far because of some of the ingenious things we introduced so as to quickly deliver it,” he said.
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