Reps throw out N5bn presidential yacht request after public outcry

Reps throw out N5bn presidential yacht request after public outcry 

The House of Representatives on Thursday removed the budgetary allocation of N5.09bn for purchase of a presidential yacht in the N2.176tn supplementary budget.

The proposed sum was instead moved to students’ loan. This increased the allocation for students’ loan to 10bn.

Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, Abubakar Bichi Abubakar, disclosed this while addressing newsmen after the passage of the supplementary budget.

Bichi said, “Actually, as far as we are concerned, we don’t have that (N5bn yacht budget) anymore. We have increased the student loan. Initially, the student loan was N5bn in the budget but we have increased it to N10bn so that our students can access that facility in order for them to go to school. We don’t have the yacht anymore in the budget.

“As you know, the budget is about N2.1tn and the Ministry of Defence has about N456bn but currently, the Ministry of Defence has the largest share because we know how important our security is. As you are aware, we had an interaction with them yesterday. Currently, we have increased their budget from N456bn to N546, 209,099,671bn.

“For Police formations and command, we gave them N50bn while the FCT has about N100bn. You know FCT is very important to us, so we want to make sure that FCT can compete with any state in the world. That is why we gave them N100bn.

“On the office of National Security, their initial budget was N27bn but currently we have increased their budget to N50bn. For the State House, their initial budget was N28bn and we maintained that.

“The Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, you know how important that ministry is, we maintained their initial figure of N200bn as well. For the Ministry of Housing, you know we have a serious housing deficit in the country and Mr. President’s agenda, he wants to build as much as he can, so we have approved N100bn for housing.

“Service wide votes initially was N615 but currently we reduced IT to N515bn.

“For INEC, initially their budget was N18bn, and yesterday we had an interaction with the INEC Chairman and he convinced us with his submissions and we maintained their N18bn.

“So far, we have approved N2,176, 791, 286, 33 trillion. We will continue to support the government so we can deliver democracy.”