December 14, (THEWILL) – Senate President Ahmad Lawan on Monday said the National Assembly will pass the proposed 2022 budget before the end of the legislative week.
He disclosed this in Abuja while giving a lecture at the maiden Distinguished Parliamentarians Lecture Series organised by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS).
President Muhammadu Buhari had presented a 2022 budget of N16.39 trillion tagged ‘Budget of Economic Growth and Sustainability” to a joint session of the National Assembly on October 7, 2021.
Lawan said the current National Assembly has made it a practice for the budget to be presented and passed before the end of December yearly, to ensure that its implementation commences in January.
Delivering a lecture titled ‘The Legislature, Legislative Mandate and the Public – The Reality and The Public Perception’, he used the opportunity to clear the air around what he described as misconceptions about the allowances of members of the National Assembly.
According to the lawmaker, the percentage of the National Assembly budget in the federal budget ranged between 1.44 per cent in 2019 to 0.82 per cent in 2021.
For him, the National Assembly has been grossly underfunded in the last four years. He revealed that the total salary of a member of the Senate was about N1.5 million and that of the House of Representatives was about N1.3 million.
The lawmaker added that the average office running cost for a senator was about N13 million while that of a member of the House of Representatives was N8 million.
Other areas where he gave clarifications included perception of corruption, constituency projects, purchase of operational vehicles for lawmakers, and the insinuations that the legislature was a rubber stamp.
Lawan also said the 9th Assembly under his leadership has been the most successful since the return of democraacy in 1999.
“I dare say that the 9th assembly has been the most successful in the area of lawmaking since 1999.
“We have broken many ‘jinxes’ and done many ‘firsts,’ overcoming traditional obstacles through consensus building and clever political brinkmanship”, Lawan said.
He said that as of November, about 2,500 Bills have been introduced at the National Assembly – 769 at the Senate and 1,634 at the House of Representatives.
“However, as I have repeatedly maintained, for us in the 9th assembly it is not so much the number of bills as it is quality.
“We have focused our energy working on legislations that have a realistic chance of being assented to as well as those that have the potential to impact most on the lives of Nigerians,” Lawan added.
He said that the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration has been most proficient in granting assent to Bills, stressing that available data on gazetted Acts showed that between 2015 and 2021, Buhari assented to more than 84 Bills, the highest since 1999.
Lawan said that the projection was that the figure would be significantly higher before the end of the president tenure in 2023.
To achieve much better, the National Assembly, Lawan said, requires the full complement of relevant institutions and agencies to deliver on its constitutional mandate.
Lawan said that with the support of other institutions like National Assembly Service Commission (NASC), the job of legislation would be made easier.
He said that the focus of the 9th assembly had been on legislations that were most likely to impact either on the democratic institutions, economy, security or the livelihood of Nigerians.
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