President Muhammadu Buhari has signed Nigeria’s 2018 Budget into law after complaining that the National Assembly injected strange projects and sundry irregularities into the document. He made the observation at the Presidential Villa, on Wednesday, as he signed the appropriation bill of N9.12 trillion, after seven months of delay.
President Buhari accused the legislators of selfishness, pointing out that they “made cuts amounting to N347 billion in the allocations to 4,700 projects submitted to them for consideration and introduced 6,403 projects of their own amounting to N578 billion.”
He regretted that “many of the projects cut are critical and may be difficult, if not impossible, to implement with the reduced allocation. Some of the new projects inserted by the National Assembly have not been properly conceptualized, designed and costed, and will therefore be difficult to execute.”
The Nigerian leader also complained that many of the new projects “have been added to the budgets of most MDAs with no consideration for institutional capacity to execute them or the incremental recurrent expenditure that may be required. As it is, some of these projects relate to matters that are the responsibility of the states and local governments, and for which the federal government should therefore not be unduly burdened.”
Some observers have described the President’s complaints as the recipe for a budget that is doomed to fail from birth.
