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Slashed Budget: Senior Judges report Okonjo-Iweala to NASS

By BusinessNews Staff on January 12, 2014

Indications emerged yesterday that the Judiciary was upset with the paltry vote of N67 billion earmarked in this year’s budget for the operation of the third arm of government.

The anger of the judiciary, it was learnt, stemmed from the failure of the Finance Minister to fulfill earlier promise by the government to increase the budget of the judiciary to about N100 billion.

Saturday Vanguard learnt that senior judges, who reviewed the N67 billion allocation to the judiciary, described it as a mockery by the executive arm and a setback to the fight against corruption and inefficiency.

A senior official told Saturday Vanguard that the judiciary was disappointed to find that allocations to the arm of government was steadily being reduced by the executive while paying lip service to the fight against the decay in the judicial system.

Documents made available to our correspondent indicated that the allocation to the judiciary was substantially and inexplicably slashed from N95 billion in 2010 to N85 billion in 2011.

The hope of the judiciary workers for a better budgetary provision was further dashed in 2012 when their vote was slashed to N75 billion and it came to the lowest in 2013 with a paltry allocation of N27 billion.

“We strongly suspect that the tactic is to further emasculate the judiciary and make the judges to be subservient to the executive and ultimately do their bidding,” a senior judicial officer told Saturday Vanguard.

“Our expectation was that based on earlier complaints to the government through the Finance Minister, the administration was going to jerk up allocation this year but that did not happen.

“Instead of increasing our allocation, they went ahead to add a paltry sum of N1 billion to last year’s allocation of N67 billion just to give the impression that something had been done,” the officer said.

[Vanguard]

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