Senators kick against PMB’s approval for N23.7 trillion extra-budgetary spending

The Senate, on Wednesday, December 28, went into a rowdy session after some senators kicked against a request by President Muhammadu Buhari to approve ways and means advances restructuring to the tune of N23.7 trillion.

At the plenary on Wednesday, Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, read out Buhari’s request to members of the respective chambers.

In the request titled, ‘Restructuring of ways and means advances,’ the president wrote, “The ways and means advance by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to the federal government has been a funding option to the government to cater for short-term or emergency finance to fund delayed government expected cash receipt of fiscal deficit.

“The ways and means balance as of December 19, 2022, is N23,719,703,774,306.90.

“I have approved the securitization of the ways and means balances along the following terms: amount, N23.7 trillion, tenure, 40 years, moratorium on principal repayment, three years, pricing interest rate, nine percent.”

However, drama ensued at the plenary when the chairman of the senate committee on finance, Senator Solomon Adeola, was reporting the committee’s finding on the ways and means when the lawmaker representing Rivers west, Senator Betty Apiafi, stood up to counter the new borrowings, and the senate president ordered her to be silent.

Events took another dimension as senators stood up and began to shout with aggression.

Different lawmakers such as Senator Smart Adeyemi (APC, Kogi west), and George Sekibo (PDP, Rivers State) raised a motion in support of Apiafi that the senate president had no power to order a senator to be silent while speaking, The Punch reports.

As the tension kept increasing at the plenary, Lawan quickly called for a closed-door session.

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