Speaker of House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has denied any wrong doing concerning the allegation of insertion of constituency projects for the principal officers of the National Assembly into 2016 budget.
Yakubu Dogara claimed the exercise was coordinated with the executive and thus was in no way a wrongdoing.
While delivering his welcome address before the House plenary yesterday after a week recess, Mr. Dogara commended the internal workings of the budget deliberations in the House and published what he said were documents showing efforts by lawmakers to smuggle frivolous line items in the 2016 budget.
The speaker stressed that the constituency projects are a part of Nigeria’s budgetary process and lawmakers are free to add them to the budget as guaranteed by the constitution.
Mr. Dogara said the Constitution gave National Assembly the powers to “make laws for the peace, order and good governance and the body always carries the executive along in the process.”
“The idea of constituency or zonal intervention projects is to remedy flaws in the estimates of revenues and expenditure where there is a deviation from the fundamental objective of equitable spread of planned development.
“This legislative intervention is complementary rather than conflictive. The templates and project prototypes are designed by the executive while the budgeting modalities are mutually agreed. As we have repeatedly said, no member of the National Assembly is given cash or contracts for the projects. We all know that execution of projects is the prerogative of the executive branch,”the speaker noted.