NASS passes budget reduced by N17 billion, first of its kind in 16 years

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.