The National Assembly on Tuesday made corrections on some sectoral allocation items in the N54.9 trillion 2025 appropriation bill earlier passed on Thursday.
This decision, followed a motion presented by Solomon Adeola and Abubakar Kabir, chairpersons of the respective appropriations committees, citing the need for accuracy and alignment with national priorities.
The Senate made corrections to some sectoral allocations for various ministries, departments and agencies, as some recorded increased allocations while others had their allocations reduced.
The capital expenditure was reduced by more than N500 billion, while recurrent spending recorded an increase by the same amount.
Following the adjustments, the capital allocation was put at N23.439 trillion, while the recurrent expenditure increased to N13.588 trillion.
These figures differed from the sectoral allocations approved on February 13.
Deputy Senate President Jibrin Barau (APC-Kano), said it was not out of place that after every budget process, errors are usually identified, due to clerical staff mistakes.
“As a former chairman of the appropriation committee in the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives, I know that normally, after every budget process, you will have some errors. Some errors are due to clerical staff errors or calculation errors, these errors are usually corrected and cleaned after scrutiny.
“Thank God, we have been able to discover these errors at this point before the bill has been assented to by the president and in which case, an amendment would have been required to correct the errors.
“I commend the chairman and members of the committee for being able to discover these errors. So the best thing is for us to move forward and get these errors corrected,” Mr Barau said.
Senate President Godswill Akpabio thanked the appropriation committee for quickly detecting the errors.
Mr Akpabio said that the Senate had to go into details, ensuring that clarity became the “mother of the game.”
“Particularly the transparency exhibited by the two committees of the appropriations, both in the Senate and the House of Representatives. We can now say that yes, indeed, the appropriation bill has been passed, but just these errors that were detected and now corrected,” he said.
Mr Adeola thanked the Senate president for his leadership role and also apologised to lawmakers for the errors.
“I just want to use this opportunity to thank Mr President, the principal officers and the entire Senate for their usual support and for the stress we took you through.
”As the chairman of the committee, we say we are sorry. We had no other choice than to go through this process,” he said.
The lawmaker added that when the budget was initially passed on February 13, N13.64 trillion was allocated for recurrent expenditures, while capital projects received N23.963 trillion.
“The first breakdown of the N54.9 trillion proposal also included N3.645 trillion for statutory transfers and N14.317 trillion for debt servicing. The fiscal deficit stood at N13.08 trillion, with a deficit-to-GDP ratio of 1.52 per cent,” he said.
(NAN)
