President Goodluck Jonathan has signed the 2015
Appropriation Bill into law, THE PUNCH has
authoritatively learnt.

Investigation by our correspondent on Monday
revealed that Jonathan decided to sign the budget
into law a couple of days back without fanfare.
As of the time of filing this report, it could not be
confirmed why the President had kept the
development away from public knowledge.

The Senate had passed the 2015 budget on April
28, following the passage of the same bill by the
House of Representatives on April 23, with an
expenditure outlay of N4.493tn, up from the
N4.425tn proposed by the Executive.

There have been concerns among Nigerians on
whether Jonathan will sign the budget before May
29 when he will formally hand over to Muhammadu
Buhari or he will leave it behind for the incoming
administration which is believed may still prepare a
supplementary budget.

But a Presidency source told our correspondent
that the President signed the budget about two
weeks ago immediately after the document passed
by the National Assembly was transmitted to him.
The source, however, said he did not know why
the President chose to sign the document without
making it public.

When contacted, the Special Adviser to the
President on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati,
also confirmed that Jonathan had signed the
budget.

Although he also did not give any reason why the
signing was not made public, Abati said the
President signed the document “some weeks
back.”

The Senate, in passing the budget, slightly reduced
the N2.607,601, 000,300 proposed by the
Executive to N2.607,132,491,708 as recurrent
expenditure and simultaneously scaled down the
capital expenditure from N642,848,999,699
estimated in the proposal to N556,995,465,449.

The Chairman, Joint Senate Committee on
Appropriation and Finance, Mohammed Maccido,
explained that the details of the figure approved by
the Senate in the document were not different from
the version passed by the House of
Representatives.

He added that the budget would be driven by $53
oil benchmark, an exchange rate of N190 to one
US dollar; 2.2782m per barrel crude oil production
per day; and a deficit gross domestic product of
-1.12 per cent.

The budget also put fiscal deficit at N1.075tn;
N953bn for debt service; N375.6bn as statutory
transfers.
Education takes the lion’s share of the budget with
N392.3bn; followed by the military which gets
N338.7bn while police commands and formations
will receive N303.8bn.

In the same vein, N237bn was voted for the health
sector; N153bn for the Ministry of Interior while
N25.1bn was budgeted for the Ministry of Works.
Jonathan and successive heads of government
had been signing the fiscal document in the full
glare of media representatives and some members
of the public, including the leadership of the
National Assembly except for the period when the
late President Umaru Yar’Adua was sick and
members of his kitchen cabinet claimed that he
signed the budget on his sick bed abroad.

The situation however changed in 2013 when a
bad blood between the executive and the
legislature over their differences on the budget
forced Jonathan to sign the document in secret.
That year, Abati only issued a statement
announcing that Jonathan had signed the bill into
law.

Also last year, Jonathan signed the 2014 budget in
secret and handed it over to the Minister of
Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and the
Director, Budget Office, Dr. Bright Okogu, for
implementation, two days after he signed it.
Abati had explained then that Okonjo-Iweala was
not around when the President signed the budget,
hence the need to formally it hand over to her.

“The President actually signed the 2014 Budget
two days ago. But you know that the Minister of
Finance was not in town. So he needed to hand
over to her and the Director Budget for onward
transmission. That was what he did today. The
ministry will be addressing the press in the next
one hour,” Abati had said.






http://www.punchng.com/news/jonathan-signs-n4-425tn-2015-budget/

Gej,still working!

Some lunatics will still see this budget as a means of looting

If the president doesn't sign the budget, na you an ordinary citizen wan sign am before?

You mean budget of about 90% recurrent expenditure and 10% for capital expenses!

Worse even is the fact that the budget has been battered already through looting of what is left of our treasury.

A government that borrows to pay salaries of her employees despite presiding over the most booming period of oil sale in our history as a country!

Jonathan is a curse to Nigeria!

GEJ my HERO! FAYOSE my ROLE MODEL!!

The pix while signing it will be epic!

His very last.