By Richard Ihediwa
Senate opened its doors this week with the leadership deciding to further suspend plenary sittings to enable the standing committees continue with budget defence sessions with ministries and agencies of government for the 2012 fiscal year.
Many agencies appeared before their supervising committees where lawmakers took time to scrutinise the performance of the 2011 as well as to screen the proposals for 2012.
Those that appeared included agencies and departments in the ministries of Petroleum Resources, Foreign Affairs, Women Affairs, Health, Finance as well as the Presidency among others.
In almost all the sessions, lawmakers raised the issue of lack of adequate implementation of previous budgets as well as some increases in some of the overheads which they threatened to slash.
However of note were those of the Ministry of Finance and that of the State House which elicited certain controversial issues especially on overhead costs.
At the Appropriation committee, the lawmakers were told by the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala that government plans to slash the federal overhead budget by N400 billion and urged the National Assembly to also slash its overhead vote.
This, she said is to enable government save some money for developmental projects.
She told the committee that President Goodluck Jonathan was not aware of the proposal as he has not been briefed yet.
Though the National Assembly had earlier cut its overhead for the year by 40 percent, the minister demanded that the slashed vote should be reduced further in the overall spirit of sacrifice.
According to her, “We still need to find more cuts. As the Executive cuts its own, we hope that the National Assembly will still cut its own in order to help us. We are going to look at the statutory transfers, look at Judiciary, INEC and others; whoever we can negotiate with to help us out this year should do so.
“We need to make that sacrifice. At the minimum, we need to find N370 billion, almost N400 billion so as to bring down the deficit to a manageable level” she said.
This however, did not go down well with the lawmakers as the committee was quick to point out that the National Assembly had already cut its expenditure for the year.
“We have reduced our own by more than 40 percent and here you are asking us to do more but we’ll take the message to the National Assembly and I’m sure something will be done about it,” Chairman of the Committee, Senator Mohammed Maccido said.
He went ahead to direct the ministry to point out that some items in the budget of the ministry were spurious and demanded that they be made clearer.
At the Committee on Federal Character, lawmakers appeared to be on collision course with the Presidency as the committee queried the N766 million proposed by the executive for food and refreshment for the Presidential Villa in the budget and threatened to slash it.
Members of the committee rejected the proposal saying it was outrageous especially in the face of the national consensus that cost of government should be slashed across board.
Trouble started when the State House management led by its Permanent Secretary, Dr. Tunji Olaopa, who came to defend the Presidency 2012 budget in the Senate on Monday gave details of the budget, which contained amounts for food and refreshments, which the lawmakers said were outrageous.
Senators particularly frowned at the allocation of N473 million for foodstuff and catering and another N293million for refreshments.
First to fire the salvo was the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator Isa Galaudu, who lamented that while other ministries and departments were pruning down their recurrent budgets, that of the State House seemed to be on the increase.
Galaudu lamented that the proposals were outrageous noting that such should not be the case when according to him, about 90 percent of the citizens of the country were living below a dollar per day.
“A country where 70 percent live below a dollar per day, 90 percent live below two dollars a day, this budget is absolutely outrageous. I think you need to explain more because our main concern is for the people we represent to see that this budget is judiciously utilized,” he said.
In his explanation, the Permanent Secretary said the size of the overhead budget was informed by the volume of events and guests received at the Presidency.
On the whole, it was an eventful week in the Senate and it is expected to continue in that wise in the coming week.
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