Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has signed the 2018 budget saying that lawmakers made cuts amounting to N347bn in the allocations to 4,700 projects he submitted. He also said the lawmakers inserted 6,403 projects of their own into the budget amounting to N578bn.
The National Assembly had on May 16 passed the 2018 Appropriation Bill, increasing the N8.612 trillion proposal presented by the president to N9.120 trillion.
While signing the budget Buhari said the logic behind the Constitutional direction that budgets should be proposed by the Executive is that it is the Executive that knows and defines its policies and projects.
He said many of the projects cut were critical “and may be difficult, if not impossible, to implement with the reduced allocation.”
He said many of the projects introduced by the National Assembly had been added to the budgets of MDAs with no consideration for capacity to execute them or the incremental recurrent expenditure that may be required.