Reps Invite Finance Minister, FIRS Chair, Others To Defend N27.504trn 2024 Budget Estimates

The Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, and the Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Mr. Zacch Adedeji, are scheduled to appear before the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations and Finance to defend the N27.504 trillion budget estimates for the 2024 fiscal year.

Other officials expected to appear include the Director-General of the Debt Management Office (DMO), Ms. Patricia Oniha, and the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Ben Akabueze.

VerseNews reports that the appearance follows a Citizens’ Townhall meeting on the 2024 budget and appropriation process, where representatives of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) shared their observations and questions.

The House Committee on Appropriations aims to ensure transparency and gather insights from various sectors during the budget defense process.

Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, Hon. Abubakar Bichi, disclosed this in a statement briefly after the meeting in Abuja.

He said: “I want to use this opportunity to thank the NGOs; we’ve heard your comments, observations, and questions, and we promise you we are going to look into it.

“As I said earlier, this 10th Assembly is the People’s Assembly. We know how important the Appropriation bill is; we know the impact of touching our people’s lives from grassroots to everybody in this country.

“That’s the reason why we decided that before we start budget defense, to call all the MDAs, we need to call the civil societies because we know they have a relationship with the grassroots. They know what is going on down there, in the rural communities, in the villages.

“We insisted that though we don’t have time, we just got the budget last week, and the President said if there’s any possibility, he wants us to pass this budget before the end of this year.

“Still, we insisted that we have to call civil societies; we have to hear from them.

“So, that business as usual could not be like that; we have to hear from our people, we need to hear if there’s anything we are doing wrong to correct, if there’s anything that we need to improve, we can improve.

“So, we have the comments from men, from women, from health, education, from the youths, students, and all of that.

“And we promise you, we are going to look into that. This is your budget; this is not only the National Assembly’s budget – the House and the Senate; it’s for the 250 million Nigerians.

“And as the speaker said, there’s nothing called budget padding. It’s our responsibility to look into the budget; it’s called budget estimates, as the former National Secretary (Senator Iyiola Omisore) said.

“National Assembly, we have the mandate; we have the power to look at what our people really need because we are representing our people, 360 federal constituencies, and 109 Senatorial Districts. So, we know what they really want, and of course, with your inputs, we can think otherwise. We have to look at the estimate from the President to see if the estimate is very okay to our people.

“If we’re going to increase it or if we are going to decrease it, so there’s nothing called budget padding.

“We can initiate projects that can impact our people, our youths, our women, road infrastructure, agriculture, and all of that.

“So, this is what we are going to do; we have told the Ministry of Budget today by God’s grace to upload the budget on the system; there’s no secret in this budget; there’s nothing secret about it.

“We want all the civil societies to be part of the budget defense so that if there are any questions on education, you can ask them about the implementation, about the funding, all of that. We are going to do that.

“Even tomorrow (Tuesday), we call the Accountant General of the Federation, Minister of Finance, Minister of Budget, FIRS; we’ll call them tomorrow for the engagement; we want to hear more information about the 2023 implementation because it’s very important to look back at what happened in 2023 so that we can look forward in 2024.

“So, we assure you; we will not disappoint you. This 10th Assembly will do everything possible, and this kind of Townhall meeting is just the beginning. We are going to do it possibly quarterly, March, June, September so that we can interact,”