Buhari to present 2023 budget in October

By Tom Okpe

All is set for President Muhammadu Buhari to present and lay the 2023 financial year proposed budget before the National Assembly in the first week of October.

Femi Gbajabiamila, speaker of the House of Representatives, made this disclosure on Wednesday, while inspecting the ongoing renovation work on the House main chamber and adaptation of a temporary chamber as well as construction of the National Assembly Service Commission office, all at the main bowl complex.

He said, the temporary chamber will be ready for use when the House will resume from its two months recess, Tuesday next week revealing that renovation of the House’s main chamber will last for about one year, while hearing rooms 028 and 231 of House of Representatives Wing has been converted and upgraded into a chamber for plenary sessions and other legislative activities.

Gbajabiamila noted that work on the chamber started in August, 2022 few weeks behind time but for a good reason adding, “So far, between August and now, giant strides have been made.”

He said: “You see that the old chamber have been ripped apart. The innovations are going to be like state of the art. We will at the end of the day be proud to have chamber that matches best standard all over the world. I’m quite impressed with the work so far. I will encourage them to double the pace. Because as it is, unfortunately or fortunately, this is not for the benefit of the 9th Assembly it is for the benefit of the 10th Assembly.

“The 10th Assembly is most likely, taking off here, unless work can be accelerated but we don’t want to accelerate work and compromise quality of work. So is better late, but done well, everything worth doing is worth doing well.

“The old chamber is not going to be ready until sometimes in August 2023 so we are talking about close to a year. But so far so good, we are happy and this temporary site where we will be sitting for the next 9, 10 months is honestly a far cry from where we used to be but they have done well in adapting, this used to be hearing room to a legislative chamber.”

On whether the temporary chamber can accommodate all the 360 lawmakers, Gbajabiamila said: “You can see the configuration, it is not just this place, it is also upstairs.

“So, I think it is about 100 seats down and above 200 upstairs, but it has been configured in such a way that everything is connected and you can see the screens, I can see everybody upstairs, everybody presiding can see everybody upstairs.”

Speaking with journalists at the National Assembly Commission construction site, Bassey Olusegun Etuk, a commissioner in the commission said the 400 capacity building was pegged at the cost of N11.6 billion.

“This project is the permanent site of the National Assembly Service Commission and the reasons we are moving here are various: security, proximity to the service targeted functions. Here, we have enough space, we are presently at an occupied rented apartment and here, we’ll carter for all our needs.”

Michael Baka, a senior architectural consultant for project said it is 70% completed and it will be ready by April next year, adding that the project has provided direct employment to over 200 Nigerians.

“We are accelerating the work to see that we complete this project by April 2023 as against August 2023. On the civic works, are on the third and fourth floors, we are 70% completed. By the time you factor in services, we say we are 30% completed,” Baka said.