Senators on Tuesday knocked the N8.612 trillion budget proposal for the 2018 fiscal year, saying it was unrealistic and would not achieve any tangible results.

The lawmakers, irrespective of political affiliations, took turns to condemn the projections upon which the estimates in the budget submitted to them earlier in the month were made.

Harsh and blunt words, reflecting deep rooted disappointment and disapproval were freely used by the Senators to tear the budgetary proposals to shreds.

During the debate on the general principles of the budget, most of the lawmakers who contributed across party lines were of the opinion that the N11trillion collectible revenue proposed in the budget were unrealistic going by the experience of previous years.

They also faulted the $45 oil benchmark on which the budget was premised and called for an upward review to $50 per barrel.

Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe (PDP, Abia South) was the first to knock the budget, describing its projections as “fictitious,” saying that “since the 2018 budget is projected to consolidate on the gains made by the 2017 budget and the 2017 budget performance percentage is just about 15%, automatically the 2018 budget proposals are done on wrong projections which, to me, is dead on arrival.”

The proposals and projections in the budget received no reprieve when Senator Joshua Lidani (PDP, Gombe South) while contributing, said the expected revenues as proposed therein were built on quick sand and have no foundation.

Abubakar Yusuf (APC, Taraba North) expressed doubts that President Muhammadu Buhari even perused or gave a second thought to any of the budget proposals prepared for him by bureaucrats before presenting them to the National Assembly.

Yusuf stressed that instead of the presidency to critically look into what could be done to make agencies responsible for non-oil revenue generation to brace up, it kept projecting unrealizable revenue collections yearly as experienced in 2019 where only N155 billion was realized out of the N807 billion projected for independent revenue generation.

Francis Ahimikhena, the Senate Deputy Whip (APC, Edo North) describing the budget proposals as “bloated and unrealizable”  said: “Year in year out, we are faced with bloated budget estimates that cannot achieve performance beyond the 15% it achieved this year.”

Senator Ben Murray Bruce (PDP, Bayelsa East) on his part, called for a drastic reduction in the cost of governance with the scrapping of agencies performing duplicated functions and those like the FRCN, NTA and VOA who, according to him, have outlined their usefulness and no longer make sense.