After a very long delay, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) finally came up with its 2025 budget proposal. At a State House briefing, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Abubakar Atiku Bagudu announced a projected budget of N47.9 trillion. The budget will be presented to the National Assembly in the coming days, although a definite date has not been fixed. The National Assembly, which is still on an unscheduled break, is expected to resume sitting on Tuesday, November 19, after two weeks of recess. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The National\nAssembly had on October 30, adjourned sitting to, according to it, enable it attend\nto oversight responsibilities. The adjournment initially slated to last one\nweek stretched to two weeks, reaching into the last weeks of the 2024 year. The\nsudden announcement of an \u2018oversight break\u2019 came to many National Assembly\nwatchers as a surprise. In the preceding years of National Assembly sessions,\nthe period of October right into December, has often been reserved for\nconsideration of the national budget. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In keeping\nwith the January to December budget cycle and in line with practice, the President\nwas expected to present the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and the\nbudget for the coming year at the beginning of the fourth quarter of the current\nyear. What this means is that both the MTEF and the national budget for 2025\nshould have been presented to the National Assembly well before now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Members of\nthe National Assembly, on presentation of the budget were expected to begin\nhearings and budget defence drawing from the estimates of Ministries,\nDepartments and Agencies (MDAs) of government, in the budget. Despite\nannouncing the readiness of the budget, it has yet to go to the National\nAssembly, as no date has been fixed for its presentation \u2013 an embarrassing\nsituation appearing to repeat the experience of 2023 when the budget was also\npresented late in November 2023. Even then, members did not have access nor\ncopies of the full budget before they passed it into law just before the new\nyear, with the President assenting to it on New Year\u2019s day of 2024. This\ngenerated its own controversy, with several members accusing the leadership of\nthe National Assembly of railroading them to passing a budget that they did not\nsee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, Senator\nAbdul Ningi escalated the controversy when he stated that the National Assembly\nmay have passed two budgets, one of which was secret and padded the national\nbudget by sums running into trillions of naira. He was suspended by the Senate\nfor these comments after he found it difficult to elaborate on his allegations.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At this\ntime, the country is currently running three budgets \u2013 the 2024 Appropriation\nAct and two supplementary budgets. It is unclear where the implementation of\nthese three concurrently running budgets are. What is however clear, is that if\nthe Tinubu administration was to be excused for the late presentation of the\n2024 budget on the ground that it had just come into office, it is not clear\nnow what the excuse can be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though the\nMinister of Budget has announced that the budget is ready and has given\nindications of some of its contents, what is certain is that like the 2024\nbudget, the 2025 budget is again late, and its history looks set to rhyme with\nits 2024 predecessor. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a very long delay, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) finally came up with its 2025 budget proposal. At a State House briefing, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Abubakar Atiku Bagudu announced a projected budget of N47.9 trillion. The budget will be presented to the National Assembly in the coming days, although […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3673"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3677,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3673\/revisions\/3677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}