Reps consider FG’s virement of N180.84b

The House of Representatives on Wednesday commenced the consideration of the Federal Government’s request for the virement of N180.84 billion appropriated in the 2016 budget.
This followed the adoption of a motion titled: “Request for Virement of Funds Appropriated in the Appropriation Act, 2016,” moved by the House Majority Leader, Femi Gbajabiamila.
The House resolved to refer the request to its Committee on Appropriations for further legislative action.
Moving the motion, Gbajabiamila said it followed a communication from President Muhammadu Buhari on October 25, requesting for virement of funds in the Appropriation Act 2016.
He said the request was in respect of funds appropriated for special intervention to fund some critical recurrent and capital items.
Gbajabiamila said: “The request was necessitated by a number of reasons, including shortfalls in the provision of personnel cost, inadequate provision for the amnesty programme, need to sustain war against insurgency and the depreciation of the naira.
“The request is also to provide for inadequacy in the provision for the National Youth Service Corps in the 2016 budget.”
Gbajabiamila explained that in the course of implementing the budget, MDAs presented issues pertaining to salary shortfalls, as it affected those that are not under the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System.
He said: “And some MDAs under the scheme would be locked out as their personnel costs would not cover salaries for the rest of the year.”
It will be recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari had requested for the approval of movement of about N180.84 billion allocated to certain subheads in the 2016 budget to other areas he described as “critical expenditure items”.
Buhari also noted that budgeted revenues were running behind target largely due to the renewed violence in the Niger Delta without supplementary revenue sources.
The President also explained that due to the shortfalls and the other challenges, “the total recurrent expenditure requirement is N166.63 billion while the capital expenditure is N14.208 billion”.