The Senate and House of Representatives Joint Committees on Judiciary on Tuesday stopped the agencies under the Federal Judiciary from going into details of their proposed sums for the 2020 budget and appraisal of the performance of the 2019 budget during defence before the committees.
The normal practice has been that Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), appearing for budget defence, provide details on the performance of the budget of a preceding year, and give a breakdown of the figures proposed for the current year. They also state the capital and recurrent expenditure with their subheadings such as personnel cost, overhead cost, allocations to individual capital projects among others.
However, at the budget defence of the Judiciary, comprising the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, Sharia Court of Appeal, Customary Court of Appeal, Federal Capital Territory High Court, Federal High Court, National Industrial Court, National Judicial Institute, National Judicial Commission and Body of Benchers, Chairman of the Joint Committee, Opeyemi Bamidele (APC, Ekiti) asked the Accounting Officers not to read out the details.
Bamidele said since each of the agencies had submitted full details of their budgets, they should just present major highlights, particularly on their challenges while other details would be discussed at an executive session between heads of the agencies and the lawmakers only.
“With due respect, because we have other assignments to do, you can just go into the highlights such as the rehabilitation of court complex, rehabilitation of Justices’ quarters. We want to know our challenges. We have this document. We are going to see the details in the executive session,” he instructed.
While pledging the support of the National Assembly to the Judiciary, Bamidele said: “Judiciary is crucial to the sustenance of democracy. Therefore, the joint Committees will work assiduously to ensure that the Judiciary is well funded in order for the country to have an efficient and robust justice delivery system.
On his part, Chairman of the House Committee on Federal Judiciary, Luke Oniofok (PDP, Akwa Ibom) said the 9th National Assembly was committed to ensure that Judiciary has it’s responsibility as the heartbeat of democracy so that the common man can get justice.
“One thing that is of great concern to us is the delay in justice and most importantly disobedience to court orders. So as a legislature we will give our support to judiciary,” he assured.
Following the Committees’ instructions, all the Judiciary agencies read out only the major highlights of their budgets for 2019 and 2020 after which the session went into closed doors, where questions to documents were to be addressed.
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