By Bolaji Ogundele, Abuja

Federal lawmakers are optimistic that the 2020 budget implementation will not be difficult.

Senate President Ahmad Lawan and House of Representatives Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila gave the assurance yesterday after the signing of the budget by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Lawan said funding the budget would not be a problem as some critical bills, which would make funding easy, had already been passed.

According to him, unlike the experience in the past when funding usually turned out to be a challenge, the passage of the Finance Bill and the amendment to the Production Sharing Contracts  would  make more funds available to the Executive.

He said: “I think the tragedy of the past was not its being passed in good time. The tragedy of the past, which could be the tragedy of tomorrow, is for us not to be able to get the revenues  that are  very important.

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“But, this time around, we have passed the Finance Bill. The   bill will provide more revenue to government. We have also passed an amendment to the Production Sharing Contracts, that will also provide more revenues.

“We all know that the production sharing contracts were never available to fund our budget properly. In fact, in 2019, N350 billion was earmarked but we couldn’t get anything. Next year , by the grace of God,  we are going to get close to $2billion and that is going to be a marked difference from what it used to be.

” We are going to work on revenue generation, collection and remittance. Once we are able to get our revenues, we are all determined on both sides to ensure that the budget 2020 is implemented fully and we believe the Nigerian public will be in support of this.”

Gbajabiamila, said  the  President had assured the Legislature that it would get needed cooperation  in monitoring the implementation of the budget.

He added: “We have committees in place in both houses of the Assembly.   I believe there’s a lot of responsibilities on us to monitor the budget and we will do that.

“I don’t think there’ll be any problems in terms of monitoring and over-sighting.”