President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered an investigation into discrepancies in the country’s 2016 budget, ordering that all errors be resolved promptly, Premium Times reports.
The National Assembly had ordered a suspension of deliberations on the President’s budget submitted on December 23, 2015. The Senate had announced that it would not be approving the budget in its current form. This decision followed the discovery of several duplications, discrepancies, and outright fraud in the N6 trillion budget dubbed ‘Budget of Change”.
Members of Buhari’s cabinet have been on a denial trip with the minister of health, Professor Isaac Adewole denying the Health Ministry’s budget before a House committee. The minister of information, Lai Mohammed has also denied some figures in the budget for the Information Ministry.
Earlier in the year, the Senate had discovered a N10 billion figure hidden in the Education Ministry’s budget. It was later said that the N10 billion is a “typo”.
Following the announcement by the Nigerian Senate on Tuesday, there has been a spirited attempt for damage control by the Nigerian government. Attempts have been made to clean up by the budget by Buhari’s Presidency. All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders have attempted to blame
Reports say a top official revealed that both the ministry of finance and the ministry of financial planning were “determined to effect necessary changes to the document in order to turn in a clean document” before representing it to the National Assembly for approval.
The government has sought loans from the IMF and from China to fund the N6 trillion budget in the face of dwindling oil revenues caused by the twin factors of falling crude prices and restiveness in the Niger Delta region.
