President of the Senate, Senator Ahmad Lawan, has explained the Upper Chamber’s delay in passing the 2023 Appropriation Bill.
The senate president gave the explanation on the floor of the Senate on Thursday.
Lawan said that “obvious problems” found in the document made a speedy passage impossible.
Recall that President Muhammadu Buhari in October appeared before a Joint Session of the National Assembly to present the N20.5 trillion budget estimate for the 2023 fiscal year.
The budget passed second reading in both chambers of the assembly the same month.
However, Lawan said, there has been a delay in the work of the Senate and House of Representatives’ committees on appropriations that were reconciling figures.
This delay, he said, was responding for the committees’ failure to present a report on the completed job to enable deliberations and passage of the bill.
“The main reason for this is that the appropriations bill came to the national assembly with some problems and when our committees on appropriations of the senate and the house started to reconcile the figures and what was presented, the problems became very obvious.
“Therefore, our committees had to start the process of cleaning up the bill first. That process, of course, also engaged the executive arm – because the bill came from there – and that was concluded yesterday.
“Our secretariat of our committees is not able to process the budget for us either today or tomorrow, not Saturday nor Sunday,” Lawan said.
He said that the National Assembly would likely pass the budget after the Christmas holidays.