Dogara said there was a provision of N300 billion to take care of contingencies.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, on Tuesday allayed the fear that the 2019 general election might be affected by the delay in the passage of the supplementary budget of N242 billion for the exercise.
He said there was already a provision of N300 billion in the 2018 budget to take care of contingencies like the election.
It would be recalled that the supplementary budget for the election was sent to the National Assembly before the legislators embarked on the recess which ended on Tuesday.
It is however yet to be approved.
But speaking on Tuesday, Dogara stated that apart from the provision which could be used to take care of the election, the passage of the budget might not take a long time.
He gave the assurance that the National Assembly would urgently attend to all issues that required prompt attention.
Said he: “We are servants of the people by our calling as representatives of Nigerians and we don’t have the right to put our interests forward before the interests of the people.
“We are here to serve public good, these issues are outstanding and it was never going to be threatened in any way as was widely perceived, because we have a provision in the budget for service-wide votes, about N300 billion and whatever was the emergency would have been met from that service-wide fund that we have allocated in the budget.
“As we are back, we have set ourselves to accomplish what is there in the interest of the people. Even if it means in a day or two we will accomplish that, even if it means handling it as we did for the ease of doing business bills.
“So nothing is impossible and I can assure you that as soon as we get the reports submitted from the various committees hopefully within the week, in no time, we should be able to deal with them, whether it is the electoral act or the funding for elections.”
