Yakubu Dogara, speaker of the
house of representatives, says the 2019 polls is not under threat over the
delay in the passage of budget for the polls.
He said there is a N300 billion
in the 2018 budget set aside to take care of contingencies like the conduct of
the elections.
Before the lawmakers embarked on
their annual recess in July, President Muhammadu Buhari had sent a
supplementary budget of N242 billion to be passed for the 2019 elections.
Although the budget has been
considered by the relevant committees, it has not been passed about four months
to the elections. This has raised fears that the delay might affect the conduct
of the elections.
But addressing journalists in
Abuja on Tuesday, Dogara said the national assembly is committed to ensuring a
smooth conduct of the elections.
Recalling there are days bills
were passed within one week, the speaker said the lawmakers would give it
accelerated hearing once they get the committees’ report.
“You see we are servants of the
people by our calling as representatives of Nigerians and we don’t have the
right to put our interests forward before the interests of the people,” he
said.
“We are here to serve public
good, these issues are outstanding and it was never going to be threatened in
any way as was widely perceived, because we have a provision in the budget for
service-wide votes, about N300 billion and whatever was the emergency would
have been met from that service-wide fund that we have allocated in the budget.
“As we are back, we have set
ourselves to accomplish what is there in the interest of the people. Even if it
means in a day or two we will accomplish that, even if it means handling it as
we did for the ease of doing business bills.
“So nothing is impossible and I
can assure you that as soon as we get the reports submitted from the various
committees hopefully within the week, in no time, we should be able to deal
with them, whether it is the electoral act or the funding for elections.”
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