The House of Representatives has resolved the controversy surrounding the presidential yatch by scrapping it from the supplementary budget submitted to it by President Bola Tinubu few days ago.
According to the Chairman of the Appropriation Committee, Rep. Abubakar Bichi from Kano State, the presidential yatch allocation as been added to the students loan now N10 billion up from from the N5 billion earmarked for it.
Bichi said: “Actually, as far we are concerned, we don’t have that anymore. We have increased the student loan.
“Initially, students loan was N5bn in the budget but we have increased it by N5bn so that our students can access that facility in order for them to go to school. We don’t have the yacht anymore in the budget.”
While briefing newsmen on Thursday, Bichi pointed out that the Ministry of Defence was allocated the highest share and their budget increased from N456bn to N546bn to boost the country’s security architecture.
“As you know, the budget is about N2.1 trillion and the Ministry of Defence has about N456bn but currently the Ministry of Defence has the largest share because we know how important our security is.
“As you are aware, we had interactions with them yesterday. Currently, we have increased their budget from N456 billion to N546,209,099,671 billion.
“For Police formation and command, we gave them N50bn while the FCT has about N100bn. You know FCT is very important to us, so we want to make sure that FCT can compete with any state in the world. That is why we gave them N100bn.
“On the Office of National Security, their initial budget was N27bn but currently we have increased it to N50bn. For the state house, their initial budget was N28bn and we maintained that.
“On Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, you know how important that ministry is. We maintained their initial figure of N200bn as well. For the Ministry of Housing, you know we have a serious housing deficit in the country and Mr President’s agenda, he wants to build as much as he can, so we have approved N100bn for housing.
“Service-wide votes initially was N615bn but currently we reduced to N515bn,” the lawmaker explained.
Bichi said the committee retained the N18bn INEC budget to strengthen the electoral body in the coming off-season elections in Imo, Bayelsa and Kogi states.
He added: “For INEC, initially their budget was N18bn, and yesterday we had an interaction with the INEC Chairman and he convinced us with his submissions and we maintained their N18bn.
“So far, we have approved N2,176,791,286,33. We will continue to support the government so we can deliver the dividends of democracy.”
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