The Senate, Monday explained why it rejected the second version of the 2016 budget brought to it.
It said the budget failed to meet integrity checks.
The senate also described the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) call for the impeachment of President Muhammadu Buhari over the budget controversy as the biggest joke of the year.
Senate Leader, Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume who briefed newsmen in Abuja over the controversy surrounding the budget, insisted that there was no need to dissipate energy on the 2016 budget since the Senate was in control of the situation.
He said that nobody ever declared the budget missing, especially when President Buhari did not read the budget off hand.
Explaining why the second version of the budget was rejected, Ndume said that the integrity checks showed that some projects that were not accommodated in the original budget presented by President Buhari were curiously injected into the budget.
He said, “There were issues with the budget that some people were not comfortable with. There were integrity checks and it was discovered that there were some loopholes.
“We asked the Ethics and Privileges Committee to find out what actually happened and it was discovered that there were two versions of the budget.
“It is not that the figure submitted by Mr. President has changed. It is still the same thing. It is not that what Mr. President submitted is sacrosanct, that it cannot be changed. It can be changed.
“It is not that the N6.08 trillion budget Mr. President submitted to us has changed or any of the subheads have changed. They are still the same.
“The President did not submit a failed document. The President submitted a budget, which went through integrity checks.
“I have my soft and hard copies of the budget. I spent most of the weekend looking at the budget.
“What I tried to do was to make a comparative analysis. So, I could not find the difference. But then they told that the difference is not in the sub-total or sectoral allocation. They did integrity checks and they gave me an example.
“That if a certain amount was allocated to do two things and they felt that that amount can be used to do four things. They said instead of two things, do four. They are still talking about spending the same amount but getting more for it.
“But what I can tell you now is that the budget that was submitted originally, there were certain integrity checks on it that made some changes in the quantity but not in the total.”
On what informed the integrity checks, he said that the integrity checks became necessary in order to match figures with projects.
On the call to impeach President Buhari over the budget controversy, he said that the talk of impeachment by the PDP is the biggest joke of the year.
He asked, “What are we to do with PDP for what they did to this country in the past 16 years. We are to kill PDP.
“Buhari is the kind of leader we want in Nigeria. The good thing is that now we have a president, before we had something else.”
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