Northern Senators Allege Padding, Say N3trn Added To 2024 Budget

The Northern Senators Forum has disclosed that a N3 trillion unexplained increase in the N28 trillion 2024 budget signed by President Bola Tinubu has been uncovered by its consultants.

The forum said the unexplained increase is unacceptable, adding that the increase was skewed against the north in particular and Nigeria in general.

The revelation was made by the chairman of the forum, Abdul Ningi (PDP, Bauchi Central), in an interview aired on the BBC Hausa Service on Saturday.

Ningi said, “For the past three months, we have engaged consultants to review the budget for us. We have some experts who are working on it line by line.

“We have seen the huge damage that was done not only to the north but to the entire country in that budget. We are supposed to sit with the Senate President to inform him about what we have observed.

“We want to show him what we have seen in the budget that is not acceptable; we will not accept them, and we don’t want the country to continue spending money on those things.

“Apart from what the National Assembly did on the floor, there was another budget that was done underground, which we didn’t know.

“The new things we have discovered in the budget were not known to us. We haven’t seen them in the budget that was debated and considered on the floor of the National Assembly.”

Ningi while speaking about discoveries made by the consultants, said, “For example, it was said that there was a budget of N28 trillion, but what was passed was N25 trillion. So there is N3 trillion on top.

“Where are they? Where is it going? So, we need to know this. There are a lot of things. We are coming up with a report, and we will show the president himself and ask him if he is aware or not.

“This is what we intend to do. We are to meet the president. We will talk to him about the Mambila power project, Ajaokuta, and the River Niger dredging. We will talk to him about the Niger Republic. Recently, they said they would construct a dam; this is not good for us.

“The action taken by ECOWAS has affected the relationship between Nigeria and Niger. There was an agreement that they would not construct a dam so that the Kainji Dam would be intact, and we would give them electricity in return.

“Over one billion US dollars was spent on Mambila, the BBC has reported. Where is that money? Who collected the money? We need to know and see what can be done. This Mambila is like the future of the North. Every part of the country has its own symbol that will save it in the future.

“One of our weaknesses in the north is that we don’t love ourselves and our region so much that we don’t care about the future. We are just living anyhow. We just love the region in our mouths, not at heart, and I am seriously worried about that.”