The House of Representatives yesterday unanimously resolved to pass the N4.695 trillion for 2014 fiscal year.
Efforts by Chinda Kingsley (Rivers, PDP) to stop the passage of the budget were rebuffed by the Speaker, Aminu Tambuwal, who ruled him out of order.
Citing non availability of the budget details as his reason, Kingsley had raised a point of order urging the House to defer passage of the budget.
The Minority Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila unexpectedly cited order 17 rules of the House saying that no motion could be moved against the consideration of the budget at third reading as he urged the speaker to use his discretion wisely.
In ruling Chinda out of order, the Speaker said the drafter of the rule envisaged such point of order which was while Order 17 was also included.
The highlights of the budget showed that the sum of N408,687,801,891 is for statutory transfers; N712 billion is for debt service; N2,454,887,566,702 is for recurrent, while N1,119,614,407 is for contribution to the development fund for capital expenditure.
Under the recurrent expenditure, component for various ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), Education got the highest sum of N373,532,095; Defence/MOD/Army/Air Force/Navy got N314,347,339,871; Police formation/commands got N295,561,812,085; Health got N214,946,652,273; Interior got N145,021,228,363; Youth Development got N75,957,608,331; Office of the National Security Adviser got N66,625,072,907 while Petroleum Resources got N55,706,174,457.
Under the Service Wide votes and Pensions component, N30 billion is for general election logistics support; N24 billion for contingency; N30,582,553,824 for payment of outstanding death benefit to civil servants (5% of total personnel cost); and N11 billion for Group Life Insurance for all MDAs.)
