The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, yesterday denied reports of a rift between the Executive and Legislative arms of government over the passage of the 2016 budget.
He made this known yesterday during his visit to the Leadership Newspapers in Abuja.
The 2016 Appropriation Bill was passed by the National Assembly over a week ago but President Muhammadu Buhari is yet to sign it into law as the document was sent back to him without the details.
“On the passage of the budget, I want to clear the misconception. There is absolutely no rift between the executive arm of government and legislative arm of government.
“It is not true that the President has refused to assent to the budget. The fact remains that it (budget) is not even before him.
“The practice really is that when the budget is approved like that, there is what we call headline figure that is approved, then it will take a few days for the National Assembly to throw up the details”, Mr. Mohammed said.
According to him, it was the original copy of the budget that would be transmitted to President Buhari after the correction.
He said the signing of the budget by the president would reflate the economy and uplift millions of Nigerians from abject poverty.
He said the budget will focus on infrastructure development, which will in turn create jobs for unemployed Nigerians and wealth for workers in the construction industry.
“It is a budget of social inclusion. It is a budget that everybody is included”, Mohammed said.
There is N500 billion provision for social intervention programmes targeted at employing 500,000 graduates, who are to be trained as teachers and deployed in primary schools.
This is in addition to programmes aimed at empowering 370,000 non-graduates as artisans and technicians.
Mohammed said: “It targets at training one million people such as farmers, market women, traders and entrepreneurs, as well as giving them loan to start off.
“It aims at giving one meal to 4.5 million pupils from class 1 to 3 per day. It is also aimed at giving N5,000 to vulnerable Nigerians such as widows, aged people and disabled people in the rural areas”.
He further stated that the social intervention programmes are aimed at providing bursary and scholarship for students studying science, technology and engineering.