Senate Passes N4.7 Trillion Appropriation Bill - Approves N7 Billion Confab Vote, As Education Gets Lion Share

 THE Senate, yesterday, passed the 2014 Appropriation Bill of N4,695,190,000,000 into law and advised the executive to implement the budget as passed.

Out of the total budget passed for the 2014 fiscal year, which is N52,230 billion higher than the initial amount of N4,642,960,000,000 proposed by President Goodluck Jonathan, N2,454,887,566,702 was for recurrent expenditure, N1,119,614,631,407 for capital expenditure, N408,687,801,891 for statutory transfer and N712 billion for debt service.

Also in the budget is N268,370 billion, which is for the Subsidy Reinvestment Programme, SURE-P, a component of the budget, which did not form part of the aggregate budget figure of N4,642,960,000,000 as proposed by the executive, which was however captured in the final compilation of the Bill.

The Joint Senate Committee on Appropriation stated that in preparing the details of the 2014 Appropriation Bill, the Committee adopted a benchmark price of $77.50 per barrel of crude oil, the executive proposal of crude oil production of 2.3883 million barrels per day, and an exchange rate of N160 to US$1.

Education gets largest share

A breakdown of the budget indicated that education got the highest figure of N373,532,095,037, closely followed by defence, which got N314,347,339,871, while Police Formation and Commands was allocated N295,561,812,085.

Before the consideration and passage of the budget, the opposition party senators, comprising mainly the All Progressives Congress, APC, had voted against its consideration, but the Senate President David Mark ruled against their opposition.

The clause by clause consideration of the bill during the plenary was going smoothly until they got to the N7 billion earmarked for the ongoing National Conference.

APC Senators attempted to frustrate the approval of the budget for the conference, but it took the maturity and tact of Senator Mark for the clause to pass through.

Senator Ahmed Lawan from Yobe had informed the Senate that during the debate on the budget, Senators condemned the N2 billion allocated to the entire North-East for capital expenditure, where it was agreed that something should be done to increase the amount, yet it was still the same in the passed budget.    (allafrica)