By Enyichukwu Enemanna
The Nigerian Senate on Saturday passed the 2024 Appropriation Bill of N28,777,404,073,861 into law, after raising the estimate of N27.5trn submitted to it by President Bola Tinubu on November 29 by N1.2tn.
The National Assembly approved that Statutory Transfers would be N1,742,786,708,150, Debt Service would gulp N8,270,960,606,831; Recurrent Non-debt Expenditure would be N8,768,513,380,852 , while N9,995,143,298,028 would be for contribution to development fund for capital expenditure, the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio who presided over the sitting said.
The Appropriations Committee on the 2024 Appropriations Bill chaired by Senator Adeola Olamilekan (APC, Ogun) had considered the appropriation for passage through its report submitted to the President of the Senate, Akpabio who doubles as chairman of the National Assembly.
Also, the borrowing plan submitted by the President was approved by the Senate.
Akpabio noted that the document would immediately be transmitted to the President for his assent so that implementation could begin by January 1.
The Senate also increased the exchange rate from N750 to N800 per dollar while the 1.78mbpd daily oil production, US$77.96 oil benchmark price and GDP growth rate of 3.88% were approved as proposed by the Executive Arm of government.
