Former President Goodluck Jonathan, former Vice President, Namadi Sambo, non returning federal lawmakers as well as immediate past ministers and presidential aides, will not get their severance allowances until 2016.

Going by the remuneration package put together by the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, their severance allowances is valued at about N3.24bn.

Sources at the Ministry of Finance in Abuja confided to Punch Newspapers on Thursday, June 4, that the allowances of the political office holders that left office last week were not included in the budget for 2015.

The year’s budget, which was passed by the National Assembly and signed by Jonathan on April 28, only makes provision of N2.3bn for “entitlements of former Presidents/Heads of state and Vice Presidents/Chiefs of General Staff.”

The Ministry official revealed that the severance pay was not included in this year’s budget, because the outcome of the April 2015 elections could not be ascertained, when the 2015 budget was being prepared last year.

He said as a result of this, there was no way the Budget Office could have determined the number of political office holders that would not be re-elected.

The official was quoted to have said: “You will recall that the 2015 budget was prepared sometime last year and during the budget preparation, the elections had not been held.”

“So it would be wrong to include the severance package of political office holders in the budget because as of the time the budget was prepared, these people were still holding political offices. Secondly, including their severance package before the elections were conducted would mean that we were pre-empting the outcome of a political process.”

“So what we do is to wait for the outcomes of elections and on the strength of this, we can know the number of people that have left office and those re-elected. As for those political office holders that are leaving office this year, their severance package would be included in the 2016 budget which would be prepared later in the year.”