Abuja — The Senate yesterday declared virement appropriation proposals as unconstitutional and warned the executive, in particular the ministries, to arrange themselves properly in budget implementation or be held responsible for any budget shortfalls.

It also cautioned the ministries and relevant government agencies to pursue vigorously strict budget discipline as the Senate and indeed the National Assembly would jettison virement as a supplementary option completely in 2010 appropriation.

The warning came against the backdrop of the heated debate on the virement proposals sent in by President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.

In it, he urged the Senate to approve the proposals running into billions of naira, which was prepared by Ministries of Agriculture and Water Resources; Aviation, Defence, FCT Administration, Health, Interior, Niger Delta Affairs, Power, Science and Technology and Housing and Urban Development.

According to him, the proposal would achieve higher execution rate of the 2009 budget.

Yar'Adua, in the letter to President of the Senate, recalled that capital budget implementation fell bellow expectation during the first quarter of the year due to implementation constraints.

"We have since made concerted efforts towards accelerating the pace of capital budget implementation, through monitoring and tracking of budget execution at the Federal Executive Council, simplification of procurement procedures, and strengthening of MDA's implementation capacity among other measures", he said.

But the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, who waded into the rising protestation of members, particularly those of the South South caucus, against the manner in which funds were diverted from projects located in their respective states, alerted his colleagues that there is no provision in the constitution that the executive should move money from one sector or any sub-heading to another.

Virement, he said, is unconstitutional and was only a creation of the authorities including the National Assembly to take care of exigencies that would ordinarily have gone through the rigours of appropriation.

"We should completely remove it from all appropriation in 2010. The 1999 constitution recognises only appropriation and supplementary appropriation as the only sources of approving funds for the executive and not virement", he said.

Based on the observation, the Senate President, David Mark, ruled that sufficient reasons must be advanced for the virement as there are strong indications that the matter would certainly receive stiff resistance.