President Jonathan Signs 2015 Budget Away From Public eye

A report has disclosed that President Goodluck Jonathan has signed the 2015 Appropriation Bill into law.
It was disclosed that President Jonathan signed the budget into law two days ago without the knowledge of the public, but we could not confirm why the President had kept the development away from public knowledge.The 2015 budget was passed by the Senate on April 28, after the passage of the same bill by the House of Representatives on April 23, with an expenditure outlay of N4.493tn, up from the N4.425tn proposed by the Executive.
Some Nigerians had expressed concern over whether the bill would be signed into law before the change of Government on May 29 or whether it would be left to the incoming Government, which may still prepare a supplementary budget.
The report disclosed that the budget was signed by the President immediately after the document passed by the National Assembly was transmitted to him.
The Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati, also confirmed that Jonathan had signed the budget “some weeks back”.
While passing the budget, however, the Senate slightly reduced the N2.607,601,000,300 proposed by the Executive to N2.607,132,491,708 as recurrent expenditure, simultaneously scaling down the capital expenditure from the N642,848,999,699 estimated in the proposal to N556,995,465,449.
The Chairman, Joint Senate Committee on Appropriation and Finance, Mohammed Maccido, noted that the details of the figure approved by the Senate in the document were not different from the version passed by the House of Representatives.
He maintained that the budget would be driven by the $53 oil benchmark, an exchange rate of N190 to one US dollar, 2.2782m per barrel crude oil production per day, and a deficit gross domestic product of -1.12 per cent.
The budget also put fiscal deficit at N1.075tn; N953bn for debt service and N375.6bn as statutory transfers.
Education has the highest allocation in the budget with N392.3bn, followed by the Military which gets N338.7bn. Police commands and formations will receive N303.8bn.
N237bn was allocated to the health sector, N153bn for the Ministry of Interior and N25.1bn was budgeted for the Ministry of Works.
This is the third year in a row that President Goodluck has signed the budget into law without the knowledge of the general public.
Prior to the signing of the 2013 budget, Jonathan and successive heads of government had been signing the fiscal document in the presence of media representatives and some members of the public, including the leadership of the National Assembly, except for the period when the late President Umaru Yar’Adua was sick and members of his kitchen cabinet claimed that he signed the budget on his sick bed abroad.
President Jonathan signed the document away from public eye in 2013 because of the bad blood that existed between the Executive and the Legislature at the time.
That year, Abati only issued a statement announcing that Jonathan had signed the bill into law.
Also last year, Jonathan signed the 2014 budget in secret and handed it over to the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and the Director, Budget Office, Dr. Bright Okogu, for implementation, two days after he signed it.
Abati had explained then that Okonjo-Iweala was not around when the President signed the budget, hence the need to formally it hand over to her.