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Sen. Godswill Akpabio, the president of the Senate, has criticized Senator Abdul Ningi’s interview with the BBC Hausa Service, alleging that the National Assembly inflated the 2024 budget.
In the open session on Tuesday, Akpabio declared that the ranking senator’s interview had “totally damaged” the integrity of the upper chamber.
The senate president faulted Ningi’s earlier interview and for also granting a follow-up interview where he purportedly justified his initial claim of budget padding.
He said: “Nigerians are bashing the Senate. Many Nigerians will never, in the future, come back to respect this chamber. The integrity of this chamber has been totally damaged, and we wanted you to repair it with your speech.
“Instead of that, you said you have more documents to prove what you are saying. This thing is in the public glare. I have not received full details up to this moment. If you had given me full details, I would have been able to know what you know.
“So far, what you know is only known to you; it is not known to any other person. I don’t know how you rushed to the press carrying different versions. The social media is very fast. From Canada to the United States to everywhere, the story was budget padding by the Senate.
“I can quote a section of the Premium Times that said, ‘This is the highest level of budget padding in Nigeria’s history where the budget passed a budget of N25 trillion, but what we collected was N28 trillion.”
Persecondnews recalls that Ningi claimed, in an interview with the BBC Hausa Service, that the National Assembly debated and approved N25 trillion as the 2024 budget rather than the N28.7 trillion that the federal government is currently implementing.
The senator, who is the Chairman of the Northern Senators’ Forum, accused the Tinubu administration of not being fair to all sections of the country with the ongoing implementation of the budget.
Ningi had said the forum would take it up with the Senate President and President Tinubu.
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