The Senate yesterday confirmed that each senator collects N13.5m monthly as running cost in addition to N750,000 monthly salary/allowances.
The lid on the pay by the federal lawmakers was opened last week by Senator Shehu Sani (Kaduna Central) in an interview published by The News online.
Senate Spokesman Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, said the figure given by Sani are contained in various line items and expenditure heads of the budget of the National Assembly which had been made public.
“Almost all holders of elective and appointive offices have running costs allocated to their offices and that cannot be said to be part of their salaries”, Abdullahi said, adding that senators’ emoluments were never secret.
He denied that senators had been up in arms against Sani for the disclosure.
The breakdown of the National Assembly’s annual budgets is not made public in spite of Nigerian’s demand for transparency.
In the 2017 budget, the National Assembly got N125billion vote.
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