The Senate on Tuesday passed N4.493tn
budget for the 2015 fiscal year, about five months after it was
presented by the Minister of Finance/Coordinating Minister for the
Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
The national budget, which was earlier
passed by the House of Representatives last week, was N51bn higher than
the N4.425tn submitted to both chambers of the National Assembly by the
Federal Government.
The Senate approval of the budget on
Tuesday, however, confirmed the non-inclusion of fuel subsidy provision
in the document but N21bn was budgeted for the funding of the Subsidy
Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme.
The Senate, in passing the budget,
slightly reduced the N2.607, 601, 000, 300 proposed by the executive to
N2.607, 132,491,708 as recurrent expenditure and simultaneously scaled
down the capital expenditure from N642, 848,999,699 estimated in the
proposal to N556, 995,465,449.
The Chairman, Joint Senate Committee on
Appropriation and Finance, Mohammed Maccido, explained that the details
of the figure approved by the Senate in the document were not different
from the version passed by the House of Representatives last week.
He confirmed that the executive did not
make provision for fuel subsidy in the 2015 budget and that the National
Assembly left it the way it was presented.
He said, “There was no provision in the
budget for subsidy but I believe there should be provision for it
especially since there was already a disagreement between the oil
marketers and the Federal Government over subsidy payment.”
He added that the budget would be driven
by $53 oil benchmark, an exchange rate of N190 to one US dollar;
N2.2782m per barrel crude oil production per day; and deficit gross
domestic product of -1.12 per cent.
Reacting to the development, the
Chairman, Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Senator Ahmad Lawan, said
the incoming government was bound to review the 2015 fiscal budget
because of various flaws.
He said, “The constitutional provision is
that we should have even passed the budget before now but due to the
exigencies of this period, we have just passed it and we have done our
constitutional duty very well.
“I believe that the incoming
administration will very swiftly bring a request for a supplementary
budget which will try to balance between the capital allocation, that
will be very much required in Nigeria, and the recurrent.
“The one we have passed is typical of the
Peoples Democratic Party’s submission to the National Assembly. In
fact, the budget we have just passed is five to one against the capital
allocation when we just have about N500bn against the N2.6tn that is
going to recurrent.
“So, we are going to do a review
definitely because the incoming administration will have to bring
something of that nature for a supplementary request.”
Lawan said the country would have funds
to finance the budget because oil prices would continue to improve,
corruption would be tackled, and leakages would be blocked.
Also, Senator Olubumni Adetunbi said the
incoming government would probably make changes “in form of
supplementary budget in line with the policy of cutting the cost of
governance because the budget is 20 per cent for capital while the rest
is recurrent.”
Senator Ganiyu Solomon said implementation of the budget would pose a problem to the incoming administration.
A critical study of the budget also put
fiscal deficit at N1.07tn, N953.6bn for debt service, N375.6bn as
statutory transfers and while education takes the lion share of the
budget with N392.3bn followed by N338.7bn for the military while
N303.8bn was budgeted for police commands and formations
In the same vein, N237bn was voted for
the health sector, N153bn for the Ministry of Interior while the
Ministry of Works had a meager sum of N25.1bn.
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