Senate urges Buhari to present 2021 budget before end of September
President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan has urged the Executive arm of Government to work on the estimates for the 2021 budget to ensure its timely presentation to the National Assembly by the end of September this year.
Lawan stated this while referring the 2021-2023 Median Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper, which were submitted to the federal Parliament by Buhari on Tuesday to the relevant committees of the Senate for necessary legislative action.
“The request of Mr. President C-in-C is referred to the two committees, Senate Committees on Finance; Budget and National Planning, with Finance as the lead Committee”.
“This Senate is giving the Committee four weeks within which to work very closely with the Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, and particularly engagement with the revenue-generating agencies where we are expecting them to meet their targets”.
“We need to ensure that they have all the support that they require from the National Assembly, particularly the Senate to meet their targets”.
“Meanwhile, the executive should continue to work on the preparations for the 2021 budget, and by this, we are also equally committed to ensuring that we receive the budget estimates at the end of September and that we are able to consider the budget and get it passed before the end of December to repeat what we did for budget 2020,” Lawan said.
The Committees were given four weeks to report back to the Senate.