The Eighth National Assembly made history on Wednesday when it passed the N6.06 trillion 2016 Appropriation Bill, reduced by N17 billion.
That would be the first time in the history of the Fourth Republic that a federal budget would be passed without a raise.
Exactly three months after President Muhammadu Buhari presented the 2016 budget to a joint session , the two chambers of the National Assembly, yesterday, passed N6,060,677,358,227, to be issued from the Federation Account.
The new budget was reduced by N17,002,641,773 from the original N6,077,680,000,000 proposed by Buhari.
In the new budget, capital expenditure is N1,060 trillion while recurrent expenditure was reduced by N2.2 billion from a proposed N2.648 trillion to N2.646 trillion.
The budget was predicated on an oil benchmark of $38 dollars per barrel, with daily crude oil production of 2.2 million barrels and an exchange rate of N197 to a dollar. sectoral allocations indicated that the Interior Ministry got N513 billion for recurrent and capital expenditure while Defence got n442 billion closely followed by Education with N403.1 billion.
The Health ministry got N221.4 billion for both recurrent and capital expenditure but Power, Works and Housing Ministry got N422.9 billion alone for capital expenditure for 2016.