Reps to Knock Out Seminars, Computer Purchase, Others from Budget

The House of Representatives will not allow overheads which keep surfacing every year to go through in the 2016 budget it is currently processing.

This it said, has become necessary to ensure that the country’s budget is not bloated.

Chairman of the Committee on Appropriation, Abdulmumini Jibrin (APC-Kano) made this position known on Wednesday in Abuja while speaking with newsmen on the state of work on the budget.

He said Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) that were in the habit of repeating items in the recurrent aspect of the budget would be disappointed this year as the parliament was determined to knock out those items.

According to him, it was wrong for various agencies to keep recycling same items over years, describing the practice as suspicious, regretting that the practice always made the recurrent budget increased while capital component shrunk.

He said: “You see an agency bringing in purchase of 50 computers and that keeps repeating itself for five years, seven years and more. Of course we are talking about the overhead; transport, workshop, training and others. All these items are what we are going to look deeply into to see that it is being reduced.”