The National Assembly will not pass the 2017 Appropriation Bill soon as the Chairman, Senate Committee on Appropriations, Senator Danjuma Goje, told the upper chamber of the National Assembly on Wednesday that the police carted away budget documents when they raided his Abuja home recently.
Goje, while raising a point of order at the plenary, lamented the damage done to his property during the raid, saying work on the 2017 budget had been put on hold since the policemen invaded his house and took away the documents.
He said, “We were holding a meeting on the budget on Thursday (when his house was raided). So, from Thursday ((last week) till now, we have not been able to meet because some of the papers are not around. Many of us are traumatised. My house as a politician is a beehive of activities; people are coming from all over the country to sympathise with me. I have no time to sit.
“From today, we are trying to start sitting again as Appropriation Committee to see what we can do with the budget. I want to apologise to my colleagues that we could not keep to the timetable you gave us to lay the budget yesterday (Tuesday) and to get it passed today (Wednesday). And I think it is not our own fault; it is the fault of the police because they interfered with the whole of the budget process and I hope Nigerians will not turn out to blackmail the National Assembly because the process was truncated by the police.” From Punch.