Senate approves N213b virement for Buhari, instead of N180b requested

Senate on Tuesday gave approval of N213 billion virement to President Muhammadu Buhari, instead of N180 billion requested in the letter sent from Presidency on virement.

However, there was mild drama on the floor during the consideration of the virement request as the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu declared that there is no provision for virement in the Nigeria constitution.

According to him, virement is not known in our constitution. There is nothing like virement what we have is appropriation Act and supplementary budget.

But the leader of the Senate, Senator Ali Ndume immediately countered DSP saying:

“You were Deputy Senate President for eight years under PDP and we had virement on several occasion and you did not notice that virement was illegal.”

Presenting the report of the virement to Senate for consideration, Senator Danjuma Goje who is the Chairman, Senate committee on Appropriation explained that the committee decided to raise the virement up to N213 billion when it was discovered during the meeting that there are areas needed to ‎inject fund that will stimulate economy.

He also said in the ‎report thatN167 billion was vired for recurrent expenditure while N44 billion was vired for capital projects and N2.5 billion was vired for statutory transfer.

The Senate had on November 17 given consideration to President Buhari’s request for legislative approval for virement totalling N180.8 billion in the 2016 budget to cater for some sectors of the economy.

The Senate had referred the request to its Committee on Appropriations and Finance, which was mandated to report back to the lawmakers in one week.

The virement request was then read in both chambers of the National Assembly on October 25, 2016, the same day the Senate rejected the $29.96 billion external borrowing plan of the President.

Buhari had explained that the request was for the transfer of funds already appropriated for special intervention programmes, both recurrent and capital, to critical recurrent and capital items.

The virement is to take care of shortfall in provisions for personnel costs, inadequate provision for the amnesty programme, continued requirements to sustain the war against insurgency and the depreciation of the naira.

Soon after the House of Representatives rose, members of the All Progressives Congress [APC] caucus had gone into a closed door meeting to discuss the virement request.

The essence of the caucus meeting, according to sources, was essentially to woo the APC caucus in particular to support the virement, especially now that it has successfully reached the committee stage.

The main agenda was to canvass support for the N180bn request to be approved at the committee stage.

The meeting was convened by the Majority Leader, Femi Gbajabiamila.

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