Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has laughed off speculations that there is a friction between the Executive and the Legislature.
This thought came following the controversy generated before the passage of the 2016 budget by the National Assembly last week after several postponements.
Mohammed, during his visit to the corporate headquarters of the Leadership newspaper in Abuja on Thursday, said “there is absolutely no rift” between the executive and the legislature.
“No issue of budget being sent back. Things are just taking their due course,” he reiterated.
He explained that it was not true that the President had refused to sign the Appropriation Bill passed by the National Assembly.
He said it “takes a few days (after the passage) for the National Assembly to clean up the document in readiness for the President’s assent.”
According to him, as soon as the budget is finally passed into law, Nigerians would be happy for it because it will lift millions of citizens out of poverty.
“The first is the employment of 500,000 unemployed university graduates who we are going to train as teachers.
“Two, we are also employing 370,000 unemployed non-graduates, people with National Diploma and Technical Certificate.
“The third tranche is the social intervention targeted at 1 million people made up of market women, traders and artisans to be trained and given loans through their cooperatives.
“The fourth one is the home-grown One-Meal-A-Day Programme. Here we are targeting several millions of pupils in primary schools all over Nigeria. The exponential effect of this one meal a day is huge.
“Even if we are targeting five million pupils and we are giving each of them one egg a day, you are talking about five million eggs that will be provided by our poultry farmers. This will also help to increase the demand for maize and then you are going to employ people all around,” the Minister said.
Mohammed thanked Nigerians for their patience and the understanding of the challenges facing the government, saying rather than give excuses, the government was working round the clock to alleviate the pains of Nigerians.
