Budget: We won’t allow Buhari to be humiliated — Dogara

Editor’s Note: This report was originally based on a speech Mr. Dogara claimed he delivered Monday morning in Abuja. PREMIUM TIMES has since learnt the event was rescheduled. Nonetheless, Mr. Dogara tweeted the remarks and publicised the full speech on his personal website. Our report has been updated accordingly. The Speaker has now deleted the speech from his website.

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Nigerian lawmakers will give maximum support to President Muhammadu Buhari and ensure that his government is not humiliated in the ongoing deliberations over the 2017 proposed budget, Speaker Yakubu Dogara said Monday.

Mr. Dogara said the National Assembly took this decision because most of its members and Mr. Buhari all belong to the same political party, the All Progressives Congress.

“I must say that the APC as the party with majority in the National Assembly will not allow Mr. President and the APC as the ruling political party to be humiliated or defeated on its budget priorities as we are all part of the same government,” Mr. Dogara said.

The comments are contained in Mr. Dogara’s address to a round-table on the N7.29 trillion budget proposal organised by governors on the platform of the APC.

The event, billed to hold Monday morning, was later rescheduled. Nonetheless, Mr. Dogara tweeted the remark and also publicised it on his personal website.

He noted in the speech that lawmakers across political aisles believe that constituency matters are very crucial to their activities as lawmakers.

“It is however, important to stress that on budget matters members of the National Assembly tend to be very sensitive to their constituency representational functions, irrespective of party,” Mr. Dogara said in an apparent reference to the controversial culture of earmarking funds for lawmakers to carry out projects in their respective constituency.

The practice has come under heavy criticism in recent years, and the call for its abolition peaked in the wake of the budget padding scandal that broke out in 2016.

Critics say the so-called constituency projects line items mostly serve as a conduit for lawmakers to syphon public funds into their pockets because they are often poorly executed or, in most cases, never carried out.

Mr. Dogara updated the governors on the progress so far made by the National Assembly in the ongoing debates about the 2017 budget and promised better transparency and accountability in its passage and implementation.