The Benue House of Assembly on Thursday passed the state’s 2019 budget of N199.7 billion.
This followed clause by clause consideration of the report of its Standing Committee on Appropriation at the plenary.
The budget is made up of N109.3 billion recurrent expenditure and N90.4 billion capital expenditure.
The house however increased the amount from the N196.5 billion presented by the executive with about N3.2 billion.
The Chairman of the House Standing Committee on Appropriation, Mr Ire Matthew, while leading debate on the report, explained that the increase is as a result of additional requests by Public Sector Entities (PSEs) for inclusion of some critical projects which were omitted from the budget.
He said the committee in its findings discovered high rate of extra-budgetary expenditure by PSEs in their recurrent expenditure without recourse to virement or supplementary appropriation in 2018.
Contributing, Mr Paul Biam (Ukum/PDP) expressed concern that the recurrent expenditure is higher than the capital expenditure in the budget.
Biam advised that the 9th assembly should give more attention to capital expenditure than recurrent expenditure.
The Speaker, Mr Titus Uba who announced the passage of the budget, warned that PSEs should desist from exta-budgetary expenditure or face sanctions.
The Deputy governor Mr Benson Abounu had in December 2018 presented a budget of N196.5 billion to the house for approval.(NAN)
