The executive arm of government may have responded to public outcry of the huge overhead of the federal legislature by cutting down the total budgetary allocations to the National Assembly by N45 billion in the 2011 Appropriation Bill as presented by President Goodluck Jonathan.

A breakdown submitted by President Jonathan on Wednesday, a copy of which was made available to Daily Sun showed the total allocation to the National Assembly put at N111.23 billion as against the N156 billion received by the legislature in the 2010 fiscal year.

A further look at the details of the allocation showed that N108.03 billion is for recurrent (non-debt) expenditure, while a total of N3.21 billion is for capital expenditure.
The figure was, however, a far cry from that of the executive arm of government as the total of the recurrent expenditure for the legislature is N108.03 billion while that of the executive arm recurrent (non-debt) expenditure is N1.76 trillion.

In this wise, the Senate is expected to receive N29.58 billion, the House of Representatives, N47.88 billion; the National Assembly Office N10.18 billion; National Assembly Service Commission, N1.3 billion; Legislative Aides, N7.88 billion; the Senate Committee on Public Accounts, N128.2 million; House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts, N138.95 million while N14.19 billion is allocated to the General Service Office.

As part of the agreement reached between the organized Labour and the Federal Government over wage adjustment for civil servants, N41.49 billion had been set aside to address the issue of salary increase. In the same vein, the total capital allocation to MDAs is N699.52 billion just as the federal executive agencies are expected to gulp a total of N9.15 billion.

A closer look at the budgetary allocation also showed that the Federal Government is expected to spend a total of N78.52 billion for the amnesty programme to cover for stipends and feeding allowance, reintegration of ex-militants, operation cost of programme and other arrears.

The budgetary allocation equally indicated that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would also gulp N45.38 billion in addition to N3 billion allocated for logistics support.
The breakdown further showed that even though the total service wide votes of the 2011 budget were put at N397.1 billion, the total recurrent (non-debt) expenditure for Ministries, Departments and Agencies stands at N53.43 billion.

The upper legislative chamber of the National Assembly which slated the second reading of the 2011 Appropriation Bill for yesterday later deferred it to Tuesday next week for the debate on the general principle of the budget. The Senate had on Wednesday approved an extension of the 2010 budget implementation from 31 December 2010 to March 2011.

http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/news/national/2010/dec/17/national-17-12-2010-002.htm