The National Assembly has discreetly increased its allocation in the 2025 budget by N170 billion through a Service Wide Vote (SWV) item, a review of the legislative order paper has revealed.
This adjustment, captured under capital supplementation, effectively raises the legislature’s funding by nearly 50% without explicitly altering its statutory transfer of N344.85 billion.
The allocation was documented in the House of Representatives’ supplementary order paper, published on February 13. Although the National Assembly had initially approved the N54.99 trillion budget on that date, it later rescinded its passage to correct statutory errors.
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A review of the order paper published on February 18, after the passed budget was reviewed, shows that the N170 billion Service Wide Vote for the legislature remained untouched. It was not listed as part of the capital or recurrent allocations adjusted by the National Assembly.
An examination of the budget documents available on the official Budget Office website confirms that this sum was not included in the original proposal submitted by the executive.
The addition appears to have been inserted during the legislative scrutiny process, effectively inflating the National Assembly’s budget without an obvious increase on the surface.
This practice is not new. In 2024, FIJ reported how the National Assembly increased its budget from N197 billion to N344 billion after the initial proposal.
Aside from inflating its own budget, the National Assembly has been caught pants down overseeing budgetary manoeuvring. In 2024, the House of Representatives claimed that a N5 billion allocation for a presidential yacht had been redirected to student loans, yet FIJ found that the expenditure remained in the budget under a different name.
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SERVICE WIDE VOTE SHROUDED IN SECRECY
The usage of the Service Wide Vote allocations has been in the limelight for being opaque in the past. The fund is officially designated as a contingency fund under the Consolidated Revenue Fund Charge.
It is managed directly by the presidency and has been described as unauditable.
In 2021, former Senate Public Accounts Committee Chairman Mathew Urhoghide called the SWV the “biggest fraud” in Nigeria’s budget, stating that its expenditures had never been audited. “Standing committees of the Senate do not know anything about its spending,” Urhoghide remarked.
More recently, in November, the House of Representatives set up an ad-hoc committee to investigate the reported abuse of the SWV. Lawmakers raised concerns over misallocation, mismanagement and corruption tied to the fund.
The post SPOTTED: NASS Quietly Increases 2025 Budget by N170bn Through Service Wide Vote appeared first on Foundation For Investigative Journalism.