The House of Representatives, in response to widespread public concerns about a N5.095 billion allocation for a presidential yacht in the 2023 supplementary budget, took swift action on Thursday, scrapping the budget and adding it to the student loans.
Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Abubakar Bichi, announced that the contentious yacht budget had been eliminated while disclosing the minor reallocations that have been made to the supplementary budget.
The budgetary allocation for student loans was not only preserved but also increased from five billion to N10 billion, providing substantial support to Nigerian students.
To fight insecurity, the Ministry of Defence’s budget allocation was raised from N476 billion to N546 billion, reinforcing national security efforts.
The minimum wage for workers was thoroughly deliberated and approved for transmission to the executive, with a commitment to ensuring its full implementation through comprehensive legislative oversight.
The decision to reallocate funds away from the presidential yacht and towards critical areas like education and national security followed the concerns of the public.
Speaking about the presidential match, Bichi said, “Actually, as far we are concerned, we don’t have that anymore. We have increased the student loan.
“Initially, student loan was N5bn in the budget but we have increased it by N5bn so that our students can access that facility for them to go to school. We don’t have the yacht anymore in budget.”
He assured that lawmakers would ensure adequate oversight over the way the funds are spent.
He said: “Actually We have submitted our reports to the House and after careful consideration, the House has approved our submissions and the breakdown is as follows:
“As you know, the budget is about N2.1 trillion and the Ministry of Defence has about N456bn but currently the Ministry of Defence has the largest share because we know how important our security is. As you are aware, we had interactions with them yesterday. Currently, we have increased their budget from N456 billion to N546,209,099,671 billion.
“For Police formation and command, we gave them N50bn while the FCT has about N100bn. You know FCT is very important to us, so we want to make sure that FCT can compete with any state in the world. That is why we gave them N100bn.
“On the Office of National Security, their initial budget was N27bn but currently we have increased it to N50bn. For the state house, their initial budget was N28bn and we maintained that.
“On Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, you know how important that ministry is. We maintained their initial figure of N200bn as well. For the Ministry of Housing, you know we have a serious housing deficit in the country and Mr. President’s agenda, he wants to build as much as he can, so we have approved N100bn for housing.
“Service-wide votes initially was N615 but currently we reduced to N515bn.
“For INEC, initially their budget was N18bn, and yesterday we had an interaction with the INEC Chairman and he convinced us with his submissions and we maintained their N18bn.
“So far, we have approved N2,176,791,286,33. We will continue to support the government so we can deliver democracy.”
