The National Assembly has been accused of abuse of power in its Budgeting and appropriation process.
The Financial Policy and Economic Planning Think Thank BudIT made this allegation in its policy document on the 2021 and 2022 Budget.
Head of Planning and Research of the Think Thank, Iniobong Usen, who spoke on the issue Business Nigeria with Tolulope Ogunjobi.
He added that the National Assembly no longer follows the Fiscal Responsibility Act in its drafting of the Budget and its Implementation of the Bill.
He added that their is no alignment between the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and the Budget in recent Times.
He said the National Assembly no longer uses or draft a Budget to reflect its essential purpose as a planning document to execute the nations’ development plan.
He said the failure of the National Assembly to properly follow the law in its Budgeting procedure was also corroborated by President Muhammadu Buhari when he accused the National Assembly of inserting over 6000 projects that were not priority projects into the 2022 Budget making it difficult for implementation of the plans of government.
He said the national Assembly must do better in its budget appropriation and plans wondering why the National Assembly will be putting in place projects that have no bearing to the work of a research institute like the Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute.
Going Further he said its makes no sense for a research institute to be made to construct Schools making the whole process a kind of State capture making the process a loss for the Country.
He said the insertion of projects into the budget has made the benefits inherent in budgets totally absent in Nigeria as it is difficult to monitor budget performance.
According to him, the National Assembly members have perfected the act of diverting money meant for capital projects into meaningless projects for street lights, townhalls and Others that have no direct bearing on the lives of the people.
He said the Policy objectives of an administration and its development plans will be defeated through this kind of abuse.
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