The National Assembly has at last passed the 2017 Appropriations Bill, raising the budget from N7.28 billion earlier proposed by President Muhammadu Buhari in December last year, to N7.44 trillion.

The Appropriations Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives respectively presented their harmonised reports of the budget for consideration and subsequent passage on Thursday.

According to the report, N434.4 billion was appropriated for statutory transfers to the National Judicial Council (N100 billion); Niger Delta Development Commission (N64.02 billion); Universal Basic Education (N95.2 billion); National Assembly (N125 billion); Public Complaints Commission (N4 billion); INEC (N45 billion); and National Human Rights Commission (N1.2 billion). The seven establishments are to get allocations on first line charge. In practice, the spending details of these offices are not made public.

Also the National Assembly has for the first time given a breakdown of its own proposed budget. The Nigerian Senate released the breakdown in a tweet on its official handle on Thursday, May 11 and copies of the breakdown made available to the members of the upper house of legislature.

In the budget, Senate was allocated N31bn while House of Representatives was allocated N49bn.  The breakdown as follow: Management of National Assembly: N14, 919, 065, 013; Senate: N31, 398, 765, 886; House of Representatives: N49, 052, 743, 983 NASS Service Commission: N22, 415, 712, 873 Legislative aides: N9, 602, 095, 928; PAC Senate: N118, 970, 215; PAC House of Representatives: N142, 764, 258 General Services: N12, 584, 672, 079; NASS legislative institute: N4, 373, 813, 596; Service-wide-vote: 391, 396, 169; Sum total: N125,000,000,000.

The lawmakers raised their budget by N10billion from the N115billion which was allocated to the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari.

The leadership of Nigeria’s National Assembly has decided to publish the budget of the federal legislature after several years of lawmakers keeping the annual document a secret. The lawmakers reached the decision at the meeting of the joint leadership of the Nigerian Senate and the House of Representatives.