2019: Presidency Singles Saraki Out For Counter-Attack

The Presidency has outrightly blamed the Senate President, Bukola Saraki and partly the National Assembly over the delay rocking the approval of Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC) budget towards 2019 elections.

The Senate President was faulted by Garba Shehu, a media aide to the president, after the former shelved the fault in the delay of budget on the Buhari-led executive.

“By now, the Nigerian people are aware that the executive branch could have submitted INEC’s 2019 election budget at the time it submitted the 2018 appropriations proposal last year.

“The executive had from January till June this year to submit the budget request. However, due to a perceived lack of foresight, display of usual tardiness or an attempt to ensure that due process would not be followed, this request was submitted only a few days before the statutory national assembly annual recess”, says Saraki, in a statement signed by his special assistant on new media, Olu Onemola.

In a counter reaction to this accusing statement, Shehu maintained that the Saraki-led senate deliberately delayed the preparations for the next elections.

“He (Saraki) is solely to be held responsible for deliberately driving the nation to this cliff edge as far as the preparations for next elections are concerned,” he said.

“It is not true that INEC submitted their draft budget to the presidency in February. No, it came much later but even then, this is not the real issue.

“The fact that their proposals came well after the president had laid his budget for the year 2018 before the national assembly meant that their own will be sent as supplementary budget.

“This was clearly stated to them by the minister of budget and national planning.”

Buhari’s aide further elucidated that a supplementary budget could not be submitted until the main budget was
passed.

The national assembly passed the 2018 budget seven months after the document was submitted by President
Muhammadu Buhari.

Shehu said there was no way the president could have submitted a supplementary budget while the main one was still pending, adding that “it is never done”.

“Unless someone has forgotten, the budget was submitted to the national assembly and it took the Saraki-led national assembly seven months to release it,” he said.

“Because Saraki did not return the main budget, we could not have submitted the supplementary one.”