2016 Budget: Senate Approves Buhari’s Request for N180 Billion Virement

Olufemi Samuel, Abuja

President Muhammadu Buhari’s request for virment of the sum of N180 million from the 2016 budget to fund the Amnesty and National Youths Service Corps (NYSC) programme assumed a frontline prominence in the consideration of the Senate during Wednesday’s plenary.

Attending to the President’s need, the Senate directed its committees in charge of Appropriation and Finance to work out modality for virment of the sum with a mandate to file its report on it by next week.

Buhari had in October communicated his request on virment to the the National Assembly for approval of the sum of N180, 839,254,439 billion from the N500 billion appropriated for Special Intervention Programme to finance other key projects such as the Amnesty programme, National Youth Serve Corp (NYSC) and the Public Service.

As highlighted in the President’s request, the Amnesty Programme is to get a total sum of N35 billion from the transfer.

The President in his request explained that the sum of N71.8 billion would also be transferred from the intervention programme.

The President had also indicated that “The total recurrent expenditure required to be transferred  is N166,630,886,954 while the capital expenditure requirement to be transferred is N14,208,367,476″

A breakdown of the specific areas the N180.9 billion would be transferred to , shows  that Public Service Wage Adjustment takes the lion share of N71,800,215,270; followed by the Amnesty Programme, which took N35billion while the mobilisation of corps members received N19,792,018,400.

Others are: Foreign Missions which gulped N14,667,230,014; Operation Lafiya Dole takes N13,933,093,000; Nigerian Air Force takes N12,708,367,476; Internal Operations of the Armed Forces takes N5,205,930,270; Margin for Increase in Cost takes N2billion, while Presidential Initiative for the North East received N1.5billion.

Also, Contingency, salary shortfall for Public Complaints Commission got N1.2billion each, even as Cadet Feeding of Police Academy, Kano Augmentation of Meal subsidy for Unity Colleges received N932, 400,000 and N900, 000,000 respectively.

According to him, the provision for meal subsidy for the Unity Colleges is inadequate for the number of students in the schools. Also, there was no provision for feeding of cadets at the Police Academy, Wudil, Kano. These situations are hampering the operations of the affected agencies.”

“The provision for Statutory Transfer to the Public Complaints Commission (PCC) was reduced to N2, 000,000,000 in 2016 from N4, 000,000,000 in 2015. Consequently, the agency is experiencing difficulty in paying salaries of its personnel as and when due”..