The N6.08 trillion 2016 budget estimates yesterday suffered a major setback as the National Assembly announced that the February 25, 2016 deadline it gave for its passage was no longer feasible due to inherent errors, ambiguities and 'padded' figures smuggled into the fiscal document.

Indication that the budget would run into hitches emerged last week during its consideration at the committee level following stunning discoveries of series of errors and paddling of votes by some government agencies.

Both the Senate and the House of Representatives had, penultimate Wednesday, fixed Febuary 25 for the passage of the budget after defence sessions with the various ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) at the committee level.

But the two chambers of the National Assembly announced yesterday that they had postponed passage of the budget indefinitely due gross errors already identified in the entire budget estimates at both chambers.

The errors identified in the budget had pitched ministers against top civil servants of their ministries at defence session.

Announcing the postponement, chairmen of Appropriation Committees at both chambers, i.e., Senator Danjuma Goje and Hon Abdulmumin Jibrin, told journalists at a press conference that the budget was packed full with errors and needed to be thoroughly corrected before passage.

He also noted that this reality had made the February 25, 2016 date earlier fixed for passage of the budget unrealistic, adding that a thorough clean-up would have to take place on the budget estimates by appropriation committees of both chambers, to make the budget workable and implementable when eventually passed at a date yet to be fixed.

Goje said, "We designed a timetable for the consideration and passage of the budget, and that particular timetable that we will pass the budget on February 25, 2016 but, as you are all aware, a lot of issues have come up and gladly so even the executive arm of government had also come out to accept the fact that there had been a lot of errors in the budget.

"Again during the budget defence, a lot of issues based on the padding of the budget arising from over-bloated overhead and in some instances cases of over bloated personnel cost. But generally there have been a lot of issues.

"The appropriation committee would look at these issues after the whole budget defence to do a very thorough work aimed at doing a proper clean-up of the budget. So, in summary the timetable for the passage of the budget is no longer realistic because the appropriation committees of both chambers of the National Assembly need additional time to be able to do a thorough job for the 2016 budget".

For his part, Jibrin said that the National Assembly Appropriation Committees will have to do a proper clean-up of the budget in order to pass an implementable and acceptable fiscal policy. "It is no longer realistic because we need sufficient time to pass a comprehensive budget,"Jibrin added.

He explained that once the budget is passed, its lifespan will be monitored to ensure that MDAs implement it to the letter.

LEADERSHIP recalls that, last week when the budget defence session began in Senate, its committee on Education discovered a padded figure of N10billion in its votes for parastatals, which was strange to the Minister of State, Professor Anthony Anwuka who represented the substantive minister but weakly defended by the permanent secretary of the ministry, Mrs Folasade Yemi- Esan.

The same thing happened on Monday this week when the Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, declared to the Senate committee on Health, that the ministry's budget forwarded to the committee was not the one drafted by him.

Adewole argued that the provisions of the budget before the National Assembly were in sharp contrast to the priorities of the health sector as contained in the original budget it prepared, adding that some of the votes earmarked by the ministry for some activities had been re-distributed while some important fields in the sector had been excluded.

He said: "In the revised budget as re-submitted, N15.7 billion for capital allocation has been moved to other areas. Some allocations made are not in keeping with our priorities. There is nothing allocated to public health and family health. Over the last two years, nothing has been done on HIV...

"We have to look into the details of the budget and re-submit it to the committee. This was not what we submitted. We'll submit another one. We don't want anything foreign to creep into that budget. What we submitted is not there. We have not reached that stage and we find the money there." But faulting Adewole, chairmen of the appropriation committees at both chambers said there would be no room for such withdrawal any longer since the budget details are already with them.

They said what they could do based on submissions of heads of the various government agencies, is to correct all the errors for the budget to be implementable. Meanwhile, the office of the Senate President clarified yesterday that the postponement of the date for passage of the budget had nothing to do with his CCT trial as being insinuated in some quarters.

Special assistant to the Senate President on Print Media, Chuks Okocha, while making this clarification, said he had to do so to prevent such insinuation being made a general story and creating friction between National Assembly and the presidency.

While in the last two weeks, government ministries, departments and agencies had been visiting the National Assembly to defend their 2016 budget proposals, complaints of insufficient funds appropriated to agencies and their asking for more money had dominated almost all the budget defence sessions.

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