The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai
Mohammed, has said that there is no rift between the Vanguard.
Mohammed said this on Thursday when he paid a visit to the Corporate
Headquarters of the Leadership Newspapers in Abuja.
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| Lai Mohammed |
Lai Mohammed stated: “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.’’
The minister said it was the original copy of budget that
would be taken to the president after the necessary correction. He also said
that there was no setback in the budget, adding that the Ministry of Budget and
National Planning was working closely with the National Assembly to ensure
hitch-free passage of the budget. The minister said that the signing of the
budget by President Muhammadu Buhari would reflate the economy and uplift
millions of Nigerians out of abject poverty.
He said that the budget would focus on infrastructure
development which would 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 that there was N500
billion provision for social intervention programmes targeted at employing
500,000 graduates, to be trained as teachers and deployed to primary schools.
He said the programmes also aimed at empowering 370,000
non-graduates such as artisans and technicians. “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.’’ The minister said the social intervention programmes also
targeted at providing bursary and scholarship for students studying science,
technology and engineering.
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