By Henry Omunu, Abuja
The 2019 Appropriation Bill debate yesterday suffered a setback on the floor of the House of Representatives.
The development followed the ill- preparedness of the lawmakers to make inputs and contribute to debate on the money bill as only 18 House members were at the plenary presided over by Deputy Speaker Yussuf Lasun, when debate on the bill commenced.
No sooner had the deputy speaker introduced the bill as the seventh item on the order paper, authorizing the issuance from the consolidated revenue fund of N8,826,636,578,915 and called for debate on the general principles of the bill, than the House Leader, Rep. Femi Gbajabiamila requested that the debate be stepped down to the next legislative date (today).
Rep. Gbajabiamila stated that the request has become expedient so as to enable members have a full grasp of the budget document which they only received some days back for them to make any meaningful contributions.
“Let’s step the bill down because of the importance of the budget, to allow members study the bill in – depth so that they can make inputs,” the House leader said.
He maintained that copies of the budget were only made available to the lawmakers last week and as such they required more time to study the document before they can make fruitful inputs.
The deputy speaker in his ruling, slated today for the commencement of debate on the budget.
He asked the members who wish to make contributions to register their names so that they can be accommodated and allocated dates to speak on the general principles of the budget.
Said Lasun: “We commence debate tomorrow (Wednesday). Those who are interested should come today and register their names: So the bill is stepped down by leave of the House.”
In the over N8 trillion budget estimate, N492 billion is for statutory transfer, N2.2trillion for debt service, N4 trillion for recurrent while N2.031 trillion is for capital expenditure.
