By Taiye Odewale
Abuja
There are strong indications that the planned 2017 budget may go the way of the 2016’s which suffered serious delay before its eventual passage.
The Presidency and the National Assembly had a ‘cold war’ over the propriety or otherwise of the 2016 budget, a development which left the Appropriation Bill in limbo for six months before its final passage.
The major challenge confronting the yet-to-be planned 2017 budget is traceable to the 2017-2019 Medium Term Expenditure Frame work (MTEF), which the Senate described as being empty.
The MTEF is a document that contains projections and parameters upon which the budget estimates are to be based.
The alleged emptiness of the MTEF document forwarded to the Senate by President Muhammadu Buhari on the 30th of September this year was declared yesterday by the Senate Leader, Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume.
Ndume, rose through a point of order to call the attention of the Senate to a report in one of the national dailies on Wednesday, and credited to the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma.
Ndume quoted the minister to have put the blame of 2017 budget delay on the National Assembly rather than the Presidency.
According to him, the MTEF document upon which the budget projections and parameters were to be based is empty, and efforts to get the minister to interface with the lawmakers over the document proved abortive.
He said: “We received the MTEF on 30th September instead of submitting it according to law by 1st of September and not later than. That is not even the problem. The problem is the content. I have a copy, I went through and the copies have been circulated. I talked to some experts. Even in this chamber, we have people we can call experts.
“If you look at this document that they call MTEF, it is empty; it is empty and it doesn’t contain anything. If you have nothing, how do you consider something?
“Going through and knowing that it is empty, on October 19, I forwarded a letter to the Minister to meet the Senate on way out, but he failed to turn up on Tuesday, the 1st of this month the meeting was slated for.
But the Senate President Bukola Saraki quickly rescued the minister from possible assaults from senators by informing them that the minister told him that he didn’t make such declaration to any reporter and that he would issue a rebuttal later.
“I think it is important that I share some information on this because I too saw this article yesterday (Wednesday) in the newspapers and I also took up the minister on why this was being done, and he denied the article and promised that he was going to make a statement to debunk it. He sent me an email saying that he never gave the interview.
“Be that as it may, I think the matter is serious enough for the Leader to have raised the issue. I have not seen it in the papers today, but I will take him by his words. But again, when those kinds of statements come out, the denial is sometimes not seen.”
