2017 Budget: Reps question Fashola over 20billion miscellaneous money (Details, pics)

Exasperated by rebuttals from Babatunde Fashola, Minister of Power, Works and Housing, over National Assembly’s responses to his recent outburst over alleged unnecessary insertions into the 2017 Appropriation Act, Abdulrazaq Namdas, spokesman of the House of Representatives, on Thursday said Fashola should be bold and sincere enough to tell Nigerians why his ministry inserted N20 billion for miscellaneous expenditure while the second Niger Bridge had N12 billion estimate.

Namdas, who chairs the House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, told journalists in a chat that “17 years after the practice of democracy, the three arms of government ought to have graduated from this level of altercations as Sections 4, 59, 80 and 81 of the 1999 constitution as amended clearly spells out the functions of the legislature.”

It would be recalled that Fashola had accused the National Assembly of inserting projects hitherto not submitted by his ministry, whilst starving critical projects of funds in the 2017 budget.
However, in discrediting the minister’s assertions, Namdas noted that “there is a clear judgment in favour of NASS in May 2016 when activist lawyer, Femi Falana, went to court to ascertain whether we can increase or decrease budget estimates of the executive and the court ruled in our favour that the National Assembly is not a mere rubber stamp.”

In his opinion, the minister should remember that lawmakers at the federal level were elected the way the president was elected.