President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan has said that the National Assembly will pass the proposed 2022 budget before the end of the legislative week.
Lawan disclosed this while giving a lecture at the maiden Distinguished Parliamentarians Lecture Series organised by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) on Monday, December 13.
Noting that the current National Assembly has made it a practice for the budget to be presented and passed before the end of December yearly, to ensure that its implementation commences in January, Lawan also used the opportunity to clear the air around what he described as misconceptions about the allowances of members of the National Assembly.
Insisting that the National Assembly has been grossly underfunded in the last four years, the senate president stated that the percentage of the National Assembly budget in the federal budget ranged between 1.44 per cent in 2019 to 0.82 per cent in 2021.
He also said that the total salary of a member of the Senate was about N1.5 million and that of the House of Representatives is about N1.3 million. Lawan also countered the claim of the legislature as a rubber stamp.
