Minister of Finance, Kemi
Adeosun and her Budget and National Planning counterpart, Udoma Udo Udoma, are to appear before the National Assembly Joint Committee on Appropriation to clarify issues in 2016 Appropriation Bill.
Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Capital Markets and other Institutions, Tajudeen Yusuf  made this known on Thursday in Abuja, after an interaction with the Investment and Securities Tribunal (IST).
Yusuf lamented that the 2016 budget proposal for IST was a duplicate of the 2015 estimate.
He threatened that the National Assembly would hold the Budget Office of the Federation responsible for various errors and padding observed in the 2016 budget proposal.
Some ministers, who appeared before various committees to defend their ministries’ budgets had raised alarm over discrepancies in the proposals presented to the National Assembly.
Yusuf, who expressed displeasure over the development, however, called for immediate action towards addressing the situation to avert the negative impact it may have on the socio-economic wellbeing of the citizenry.
“We took the budget of the IST, which is the Investment Court, and unfortunately, we realised what was contained in the 2016 budget proposal was just an exact copy of the 2015 budget appropriation.
“It is word-for-word and figure-for-figure; items that have been completed in 2015 were repeated.
“Fortunately, the Senate too is aware of that and we are thinking of having a tripartite meeting between the House, Senate and Federal Ministry of Finance.
“This is to ask some basic questions why we have what we have, so that as a House, we will do what is needful,” he said. While giving update on the oversight functions to the IST office in Lagos, Yusuf disclosed that the committee observed some infractions in the implementation of the 2015 budget.
According to him, IST is a special court that deals with only issues on capital market investment so as to build confidence.
“So, the IST has the responsibility of discharging any case before first two months or the third month. The Nigerian Stock Exchange provides contributions to fund it,” he said.
In a related development, the House Committee on Basic Education chaired by Zakari Mohammed (Kwara-APC), has discontinued the consideration of the 2016 budget defence for Federal Ministry of Education and its agencies.
The discontinuation followed irregularities discovered in the estimates, which included those of no fewer than 30 federal universities, colleges of education, among others.
According to Mohammed, the budget presented by the ministry to the committee is in total variance to the one presented to the National Assembly.