Former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has accused members of the 7th National Assembly of receiving N17bn as bribe to pass 2015 budget.
Iweala made this revelation in her book entitled: Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines.
A frontline account of how to fight corruption, the ex-minister in it, revealed that the National Assembly leadership forced the executive arm under ex-President Goodluck Jonathan to part with N17 billion for the federal lawmakers to pass that year’s budget.
She wrote that the bribe was besides the NASS N150 billion annual ‘standard’ budget.
According to her: “Senators and Representatives felt that their role as appropriators of the budget was not just to vet and approve budget parameters and oversee budget implementation, but also to shape the size and content of the budgets, including details of specific projects… sought to add more to individual projects or create completely new, unappropriated major projects, thereby distorting the budget.
She added: “National Assembly members had negotiated large increases in the National Assembly budgets and would brook no discussions or challenges on the issue.
“Their operational budget had ballooned to N150 billion or 16 per cent of the budget and almost 3.5 times the 2006 budget (in naira)… In a tough session with the National Assembly’s ad hoc committee on the budget (made up of chairs of the Finance Committee and Appropriation Committee of both chambers and other leaders of the National Assembly), an additional N20 billion was re-introduced as election expenses for National Assembly members.
“We insisted the amount be dropped because it nullified the 13 per cent cut made to their statutory budget, but managed to reduce the N20 billion figure by only N3 billion to N17 billion.”
