The National Assembly has passed into law a sum of N7.44 trillion as 2017 budget. This raises the estimates from the proposed N7.28 billion to N7.44 trillion.
Of the total sum, the National Assembly will get N125, billion as its budget for the year under review. The figure marks an increase of N10 billion over the N115 billion approved for National Assembly in 2016.
The budget passage comes after the Appropriations Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives separately presented their harmonised reports of the budget for consideration and subsequent passage on Thursday, five months after it was presented to a joint session of the legislature by President Muhammadu Buhari.
A breakdown of the budget reveals N434.4 billion was appropriated for statutory transfers to the National Judicial Council (N100 billion); Niger Delta Development Commission (N64.02 billion); Universal Basic Education (N95.2 billion); National Assembly (N125 billion); Public Complaints Commission (N4 billion); INEC (N45 billion); and National Human Rights Commission (N1.2 billion), with all seven establishments getting allocations on first line charge.
The sum of N2,987,550,033,436 was appropriated for non-debt recurrent expenditure of the MDAs that are not under statutory transfers club, while capital expenditure is slightly less, taking N2,177,866,775867.
Furthermore, the National Assembly earmarked N1,488,002,436,547 to service domestic debts; N175,882,993,952 for foreign debts; and 177,460,296707 for sinking fund to retire maturing loans, totalling 1,841,345,727,206 for debt service.
A breakdown of the national Assembly’s budget shows that of the N125 billion approved, the Management has a vote of N14,919,065,013; the Senate has an allocation of N31,398,765,886 while the House of Representatives would spend N49,052,743,983.
The Management would also spend N6,714,696,986 as personnel cost so; N6,192,052,825 for Overhead costs and N2,011,315,202 as total capital.
The Senate would spend N1,856,510,517 on personnel costs; N25,111,332,147 as total Overhead costs and N4,430,923,222 as total capital.
For the House of Representatives, it has N4,923,743,127 as total personnel costs; N39,635,756,179 as total overhead costs and N4,493,244,677 as total capital.
